Ai Panorama

[Nikky Schreier]

Apanoramic view is also purposed for multimedia, cross-scale applications to an outline overview (from a distance) along and across repositories. This so-called "cognitive panorama" is a panoramic view over, and a combination of, cognitive spaces[3] used to capture the larger scale.

This novel perspective was quickly conveyed to America by Benjamin Franklin who was present for the first manned balloon flight by the Montgolfier brothers in 1783, and by the American-born physician, John Jeffries who had joined French aeronaut Jean Pierre Blanchard on flights over England and the first aerial crossing of the English Channel in 1785.[6]

In the mid-19th century, panoramic paintings and models became a very popular way to represent landscapes, topographic views[7] and historical events. Audiences of Europe in this period were thrilled by the aspect of illusion, immersed in a winding 360-degree panorama and given the impression of standing in a new environment. The panorama was a 360-degree visual medium patented under the title Apparatus for Exhibiting Pictures by the artist Robert Barker in 1787. The earliest that the word "panorama" appeared in print was on June 11, 1791, in the British newspaper The Morning Chronicle, referring to this visual spectacle.[8] Barker created a painting, shown on a cylindrical surface and viewed from the inside, giving viewers a vantage point encompassing the entire circle of the horizon, rendering the original scene with high fidelity. The inaugural exhibition, a "View of Edinburgh" (specifically the view from the summit of Calton Hill), was first shown in that city in 1788, then transported to London in 1789. By 1793, Barker had built "The Panorama" rotunda at the center of London's entertainment district in Leicester Square, where it remained attracting visitors for 70 years, then closing in 1863,[9] before being converted into the church of Notre Dame de France.

Inventor Sir Francis Ronalds developed a machine to remove errors in perspective that were created when a sequence of planar sketches was combined into a cylinder. It also projected the cylindrical drawing onto the wall of the rotunda at much larger scale to enable its accurate painting. The apparatus was exhibited at the Royal Polytechnic Institution in the early 1840s.[10]

Large scale installations enhance the illusion for an audience of being surrounded with a real landscape. The Bourbaki Panorama in Lucerne, Switzerland was created by Edouard Castres in 1881.[11] The painting measures about 10 metres in height with a circumference of 112 meters.[12] In the same year of 1881, the Dutch marine painter Hendrik Willem Mesdag created and established the Panorama Mesdag of The Hague, Netherlands, a cylindrical painting more than 14 metres high and roughly 40 meters in diameter (120 meters in circumference). In the United States of America is the Atlanta Cyclorama, depicting the Civil War Battle of Atlanta. It was first displayed in 1887, and is 42 feet high by 358 feet circumference (13 109 metres).[13] Also on a gigantic scale, and still extant, is the Racławice Panorama (1893) located in Wrocław, Poland, which measures 15 120 metres.[14]

Panoramic photography soon came to displace painting as the most common method for creating wide views. Not long after the introduction of the Daguerreotype in 1839, photographers began assembling multiple images of a view into a single wide image.[15] In the late 19th century, flexible film enabled the construction of panoramic cameras using curved film holders and clockwork drives to rotate the lens in an arc and thus scan an image encompassing almost 180 degrees.[citation needed]

Pinhole cameras of a variety of constructions can be used to make panoramic images. A popular design is the "oatmeal box", a vertical cylindrical container in which the pinhole is made in one side and the film or photographic paper is wrapped around the inside wall opposite, and extending almost right to the edge of, the pinhole. This generates an egg-shaped image with more than 180 view.[16]

Popular in the 1970s and 1980s, but now superseded by digital presentation software, Multi-image[17] (also known as multi-image slide presentations, slide shows or diaporamas) 35mm slide projections onto one or more screens characteristically lent themselves to the wide screen panorama. They could run autonomously with silent synchronization pulses to control projector advance and fades, recorded beside an audio voice-over or music track. Precisely overlapping slides placed in slide mounts with soft-edge density masks would merge seamlessly on the screen to create the panorama. Cutting and dissolving between sequential images generated animation effects in the panorama format.

Digital photography of the late twentieth century greatly simplified this assembly process, which is now known as image stitching. Such stitched images may even be fashioned into forms of virtual reality movies, using technologies such as QuickTime VR, Flash, Java, or even JavaScript. A rotating line camera such as the Panoscan allows the capture of high resolution panoramic images and eliminates the need for image stitching, but immersive "spherical" panorama movies (that incorporate a full 180 vertical viewing angle as well as 360 around) must be made by stitching multiple images. Stitching images together can be used to create extremely high resolution gigapixel panoramic images.

I just wanted to commit some changes to our panorama configuration and noticed, that a new user with the name "__vm_series" was added in the commit changes as a full panorama-admin. Curiously, that user was hidden in the web-gui under Panorama -> Administrators. This was among some changes around adding new firewalls, so my best guess is that this user was added automatically somewhere around that process. BTW: We're running Panorama on 10.2.5 with the vm-series plugin 3.0.5 installed.

Testing the impact of this discovery, I discarded the changes and created that user manually and sure enough, it isn't listed, but I can log it in on the web gui. For obvious reasons, having users with administrative access set up and working, but hidden is a serious problem in our security posture.

Do you only have local authentication enabled? No RADIUS, SAML, LDAP or kerberos authentication methods? Admins from external authentication won't be listed in the local admin list, but will show up in the logs. How are you logging in as the user if you don't know the password?

All regular "People" accounts are using Radius, but they're all set up locally under "Panorama -> Administrators" and set with a Radius Authentication-Profile. I suspect you're referring to the default Authentication profile set up under "Panorama -> Setup -> Management -> Authentication Settings". If you set an authentication profile there, Panorama (or any PanOS device, really) authenticates anyone it doesn't locally know as long as that authentication succeeds. However, we don't use that. Every administrator that can login is set up under "Panorama -> Administrators".

The situation I'm investigating goes as far as me going to Panorama -> Administrators, clicking "Add", setting up that admin and upon hitting "Save", I see the new user for a split-second in the list before it just disappeared. It worked perfectly fine after committing the change and did show up in the running-config.xml when I downloaded and examined that, but the GUI did not show it. Consequently, it's also not that easy to delete it. I was able to simply revert my change, but if you were to find this long after, you'd have to download the running config, remove the user from the xml, upload the changed file and load-commit that.

I wonder if you got a response from Palo Alto about this system user. I'm seeing the same on our virtual appliance Panorama and we need to justify every user/admin that shows up in panorama. In my case, I see this admin show up when I perform "show admins all" from the CLI"

"The behavior you described in your report is intended: the `__vm_series` user is created and used by the vm_series plugin. The engineering team indicated that while the user is hidden from the web user interface, it should be visible via the command line interface ("show admins all" command). The engineering team was also able to confirm that when actions are taken by this user, such as in the scenario you described with replacing the password hash in the config file, a system log will be generated. Additionally, if the vm_series plugin modifies the configuration using this user, a configuration log will be generated.".

Checking the CLI on my Panorama I see our expected local administrator user and the following accounts that don't show up in the UI:

admin

__cloud_services

__vm_series

__ztp

__cloudconnector

I'm going to guess that all accounts starting with __ are some sort of hidden service accounts. ZTP and Cloudconnector/Cloudservices are likely related to the Prisma services and data lake, as well as the ZTP functionality added around 9.1.4. I'd have to guess that the vm_series is similar, possibly tied into the VM plugin functions for graceful shutdowns and such, but it would be nice if Palo had some information about these service users disclosed.

- Some sort of information about what functions/services these serve, verification they're expected, etc.

- Are they limited in any ways or are they full admin accounts?

the little "playing around" I've done in our Panorama told me, that these are full admin accounts. I could even see the vm_series user appear and disappear when I installed and removed the VM-Series plugin.

As for what the password is, I haven't played around with it too much, but it was assigned automatically. Since Palo Alto says they're the coolest kid on the block, I assume that this password is also a strong and randomly chosen one. However, since it uses local credentials, the password hash is contained in any config export you make and you can absolutely change it on an exported config and re-import and load it into Panorama. That way I was able to give it a password that I know and could login as that user just fine.

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