The 5 different types of firewalls explained
More than 30 years after the network firewall concept entered the security conversation, technology remains an essential tool in the enterprise network security arsenal. The firewall, a mechanism that filters malicious traffic before it passes the network environment, has proven its worth over decades. However, as with any core technology used for a long time, advances have helped improve both the firewall's capabilities and deployment options.
The firewall dates back to an early era in the modern internet age, when system administrators discovered network environments were compromised by external attackers. It was destined to be some kind of process that looks at network traffic for clear signs of events.
Steven Bellovin, then a fellow at AT&T Labs Research and now a professor in the computer science department at Columbia University, is generally credited—if not his own—for first using the term firewall to describe the process of filtering out unwanted network traffic. The name was a metaphor that likened the device to parts of the fire that prevented the fire from passing from one part of the physical structure to another. In the case of networking, the idea was to place some sort of filter between the apparently secure internal network and any traffic entering or leaving its wider internet connection.
The term has gradually grown in familiar usage to the point where no casual conversation can happen without at least mentioning about network security. Along the way, the firewall has evolved into different types of firewalls.
This article argues that somehow arbitrarily there are five basic types of firewalls that use different mechanisms to identify and filter malicious traffic, but the exact number of options is not as important as the idea that different firewall products do quite different things. Additionally, organizations may need more than five firewalls to better protect their systems. Or, a single firewall can provide more than one of these firewall types. There are also three different firewall deployment options to consider, which we'll explore in more detail.
The five types of firewalls include:
packet filtering firewall
circuit level gateway
application level gateway (aka proxy firewall)
stateful inspection firewall
next generation firewall (NGFW)
Firewall devices and services can provide protection beyond the standard firewall functionality - for example, servers on the private network by providing an intrusion detection or prevention system (IDS / IPS), denial of service (DoS) attack protection, session monitoring and other security services to protect devices. While some types of firewalls can work as multi-functional security devices, they must be part of a multi-layered architecture that enforces effective corporate security policies.
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