In recently deploying the Captive Portal feature of a Palo Alto Networks Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) in testing we were finding Apple Macs take 120+ seconds to load the sign-in page. First thoughts jumped to the Apple Captive Network Assistance (CNA) feature not functioning correctly however this appeared to be a dead end. Some time and a few packet captures later showed that the Mac wasn’t even trying to reach out to the Captive Portal in a timely manner, after much head scratching the customer I was working with suggested that their Sophos Endpoint agent (Intercept X) might be the cause of this problem.
Disabling the agent didn’t seem to resolve the issue however uninstalling it did – the Captive Portal page appeared nearly instantly. In reviewing the packet captures again it was clear the Sophos agent was trying to reach out to a reputation service which was being blocked by the authentication profile on the firewall, it just took a really long time for the agent to stop trying and allow access to the Captive Portal.
To work around this issue the domains listed in the link below were added to an authentication bypass policy on the NGFW, with this in place the Captive Portal loaded promptly. If anything it makes sense to allow unauthenticated access to such services (including Windows Update and the likes) to ensure a client has the ability to update itself regardless of authentication status.
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