156-315.81.20 Practice Test 5 — 10 Questions

Question 1

During a Connectivity Upgrade of a cluster, what happens to the traffic when the first member (Member A) is being upgraded and is currently down?

Accepted Answer

Member B takes over all traffic and maintains existing session states.. The goal of a cluster upgrade is to maintain availability. When one member is taken offline for an upgrade, the cluster's failover mechanism ensures that the remaining members take over its traffic. In a Connectivity Upgrade, this is managed carefully to ensure session persistence.

Answer

Traffic is dropped until Member A returns with the new version.

Answer

The Management Server takes over traffic inspection temporarily.

Answer

The cluster enters 'Down' state and requires manual traffic routing.

Question 2

A security engineer configures Threat Emulation to inspect incoming archive files containing nested compressed directories. During testing, an archive containing six nested levels of ZIP files bypasses deep emulation inspection. What is the most likely configuration cause?

Accepted Answer

The maximum archive extraction depth limit in the Threat Emulation advanced settings was reached and traversal stopped.. SandBlast Threat Emulation enforces strict limits on archive extraction depth to protect gateway CPU and memory resources from denial-of-service attacks utilizing zip bombs. Exceeding the maximum archive depth threshold stops recursive extraction, meaning deeply nested files are passed without full emulation analysis. Administrators must balance security depth against gateway performance limits.

Answer

The file type filter profile was configured to exclude compressed archives exceeding four megabytes from sandbox evaluation.

Answer

Threat Extraction was disabled in the active policy layer, causing compressed payloads to bypass all inspection engines automatically.

Answer

The local Threat Emulation private cloud appliance encountered a CPU throttling event during the nested extraction phase.

Question 3

Which cryptographic function is primary in verifying the integrity of IKE packets during the negotiation?

Accepted Answer

SHA-256 hashing.. Integrity is verified using Hashed Message Authentication Codes (HMACs) or similar hashing functions like SHA-256. During IKE negotiation, these algorithms ensure that the packets haven't been tampered with in transit. If an attacker modifies the negotiation parameters, the hash comparison at the receiving end will fail, causing the gateway to drop the packet and prevent a potential man-in-the-middle attack.

Answer

Diffie-Hellman (DH) exchange.

Answer

AES-GCM encryption.

Answer

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI).

Question 4

Which mechanism does ClusterXL use to prevent the 'split-brain' scenario in a High Availability deployment?

Accepted Answer

A dedicated synchronization network interface.. Split-brain occurs when both nodes believe they are the master due to a loss of communication. ClusterXL uses multiple mechanisms, including heartbeat packets over dedicated synchronization links, to ensure nodes remain in contact. If communication fails, logic is applied to prevent both from becoming active. This is crucial for avoiding duplicate IP address conflicts and ensuring consistent policy enforcement across the network infrastructure.

Answer

A shared storage heartbeat file.

Answer

An external load balancer to monitor member health.

Answer

ARP resolution with the default gateway.

Question 5

You are preparing to upgrade a Security Gateway from R80.40 to R81.20 using CPUSE. Before initiating the upgrade, you want to ensure a smooth process. Which TWO actions are recommended best practices? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Take a system snapshot before upgrading.. Taking a system snapshot and verifying sufficient disk space are both recommended best practices before a CPUSE upgrade. A snapshot provides a rollback point, and adequate disk space ensures the upgrade package can be downloaded and installed. Disabling policies, uninstalling hotfixes, and upgrading during peak hours are not recommended and can increase risk.

Answer

Uninstall all hotfixes before upgrading.

Answer

Schedule the upgrade during peak business hours to minimize impact.

Answer

Disable all security policies before upgrading.

Question 6

A firewall engineer is troubleshooting a CoreXL-enabled R81.20 gateway where a single firewall instance appears saturated while others are lightly loaded, even though SecureXL is active and the interface is configured for multi-queue. After reviewing fw ctl multik stat output, the engineer suspects that the distribution of connections across instances is uneven. Which factor most directly explains why CoreXL instance distribution can become skewed on this gateway?

Accepted Answer

A small number of very high-volume, long-lived connections whose source and destination pairs consistently hash to the same firewall instance.. CoreXL dispatches connections to firewall instances based on a hash of connection parameters. When a few long-lived, high-volume flows dominate the traffic mix, their hashes can repeatedly select the same instance, producing one saturated instance while others remain idle. Template state and core reservation schemes do not produce this specific skew pattern.

Answer

The gateway using only two cores for the Firewall Kernel while the remaining cores are reserved exclusively for SecureXL processing.

Answer

The firewall instance count exceeding the number of physical cores, causing instances to time-share and one instance to starve others.

Answer

SecureXL templates being disabled, which forces every packet through the Firewall Kernel and removes instance-level distribution.

Question 7

A security administrator is troubleshooting a Security Gateway that shows low throughput despite low CPU utilization. The administrator runs 'fwaccel stats -s' and observes that the 'Accelerated' packet count is extremely low, while 'F2F' (Forward to Firewall) packets are high. The administrator wants to understand why traffic is being sent to the Firewall path instead of being accelerated. Which of the following is the most likely reason for this behavior?

Accepted Answer

The traffic is being processed by the Firewall path due to a feature that is not supported by SecureXL, such as IPsec VPN or NAT with port translation.. SecureXL accelerates only traffic that does not require complex processing. Features like IPsec VPN, NAT with port translation, and deep inspection force packets to the Firewall path, increasing F2F counts. The low accelerated count and high F2F count indicate that a significant portion of traffic is being handled by the Firewall. The administrator should review the rulebase and gateway configuration for such features.

Answer

The SecureXL templates are disabled, causing all packets to be forwarded to the Firewall path.

Answer

The SecureXL device driver is not loaded, so all packets are handled by the Firewall kernel.

Answer

The CoreXL firewall instances are not properly distributing traffic, causing a bottleneck on a single core.

Question 8

An administrator is configuring Threat Extraction on a R81.20 Security Gateway. They want to ensure that files are sanitized and delivered quickly while maintaining security. Which TWO actions should they take? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Configure Threat Emulation to run in the background while the sanitized file is delivered.. Threat Extraction delivers a sanitized file immediately while Threat Emulation runs in the background on the original. This combination ensures fast delivery with security. Disabling emulation or delivering the original file first compromises security, and size-based sanitization is not a recommended practice.

Answer

Disable Threat Emulation to reduce latency.

Answer

Configure Threat Extraction to only sanitize files larger than 10 MB.

Answer

Set Threat Extraction to deliver the original file and then sanitize it if malicious.

Question 9

A security administrator is troubleshooting a performance bottleneck on a Check Point Security Gateway. The administrator suspects that SecureXL is not accelerating a large portion of traffic. Which command should the administrator use to identify which traffic is being accelerated and which is not?

Accepted Answer

fwaccel stats -s. The 'fwaccel stats -s' command provides comprehensive statistics on SecureXL acceleration, including the number of packets in the fast path, medium path, and slow path. It helps administrators understand which traffic is being accelerated and which is not, enabling targeted performance tuning. Other commands like 'fw monitor' or 'cpview' are useful for different purposes but do not provide the same level of detail on SecureXL acceleration.

Answer

fw ctl zdebug + drop

Answer

fw monitor -e 'accept;'

Answer

cpview -t

Question 10

An administrator is configuring Threat Emulation on a Check Point R81.20 Security Gateway. The administrator wants to ensure that files downloaded from the internet are inspected in a sandbox environment. Which of the following best describes the function of the Threat Emulation blade?

Accepted Answer

It executes files in a virtual sandbox to detect malicious behavior and block threats.. Threat Emulation is a Check Point blade that sends files to a sandbox for dynamic analysis, executing them in a virtual environment to detect malicious behavior. This allows it to catch unknown threats that signature-based methods might miss. The other options describe different blades: Threat Extraction sanitizes content, Anti-Virus uses signatures, and Anti-Bot monitors traffic, none of which provide sandbox execution.

Answer

It inspects network traffic for command and control communication and blocks it.

Answer

It scans files for known virus signatures and blocks them based on a signature database.

Answer

It extracts malicious macros from documents and replaces them with benign content.