What can missing SSL packets when performing a packet capture on dataplane interfaces?

Palo Alto Networks firewalls utilize dedicated hardware processors on the dataplane for accelerating specific tasks like SSL decryption and encryption. When SSL traffic is hardware offloaded, it bypasses the software path that standard packet capture mechanisms monitor, causing these packets to be 'missing' from the capture.

The management plane CPU handles administrative tasks and does not offload or process high-throughput data plane traffic such as SSL packets.

Packet capture tools record raw network packets regardless of whether their payload is encrypted; encryption itself does not prevent the capture of the packet, only the readability of its contents.

Hardware offloading, including FPGAs, occurs on the dataplane, not the management plane, and missing packets due to offloading is a design characteristic for performance, not necessarily a hardware problem.