350-401 Exam Dumps - Cisco CCNP Enterprise Questions and Answers

Next-generation firewalls extend traditional firewall behavior by adding deeper traffic inspection and application-level intelligence. Packet filtering, stateful inspection, and VPN support existed before NGFWs and are not unique to them. Traditional firewalls can permit or deny traffic based on source IP, destination IP, protocol, port, and connection state. NGFWs add the ability to inspect application payloads more deeply, identify applications even when they use nonstandard ports, apply policy based on application identity, detect threats inside permitted sessions, and integrate IPS or malware inspection. Therefore, deep packet inspection and application awareness are the best answers. Deep packet inspection allows the firewall to examine packet contents beyond simple Layer 3 and Layer 4 headers. Application awareness allows policy to distinguish, for example, legitimate HTTPS business traffic from risky file-sharing, tunneling, or unauthorized application traffic over the same port. VPN is useful but not unique to NGFWs. Stateful inspection is also a core feature of earlier stateful firewalls. References/topics: ENCOR Security, next-generation firewall, application visibility, deep packet inspection, IPS, advanced threat protection.

The correct answer is B. TLS or SSL for communication.

In basic API authentication, credentials (such as username and password) are often transmitted using Base64 encoding, which is not encrypted. This makes them vulnerable to sniffer (packet capture) attacks if sent over an unencrypted channel.

TLS (Transport Layer Security) and its predecessor SSL provide encryption of the communication channel.

This ensures that even if packets are captured, the credentials remain confidential and unreadable.

Cisco documentation emphasizes that APIs (RESTCONF, HTTP-based APIs) should use HTTPS (HTTP over TLS) to secure credentials in transit.

A. VPN connection between client and server While a VPN encrypts traffic, it is not specifically required for API authentication security. The standard and expected method is TLS/HTTPS.

C. AAA services to authenticate the API AAA controls who can access, but it does not encrypt credentials in transit.

D. next-generation firewall A firewall provides traffic filtering and threat protection but does not directly secure credential transmission in basic API authentication.

Basic Authentication = NOT secure by itself

Always pair it with HTTPS (TLS encryption)

Rule to remember:

If credentials travel over the network → encrypt with TLS