High Availability Encryption

High Availability encryption adds security to the communication between the firewalls in an HA pair. HA control messages between the Active and Standby firewalls, such as heartbeats, configuration sync and HA state information, are encrypted to ensure security for inter-node communication.

This option is available in Active/Standby and Active/Active DPI HA modes and does not apply to messages exchanged for stateful synchronization. To enable it, select Enable Encryption for Control Communication in the GENERAL SETTINGS section on DEVICE | High Availability > Settings. Discovery messages (find-peer and found-peer) are transmitted without encryption. After the discovery stage, the firewalls encrypt all control messages:

• Heartbeats
• Messages used for incremental config updates
• prefSync messages
• Various messages for sending HA commands between the firewall pair
• Firmware sync messages