Firewalls are network security devices that monitor both incoming and outgoing network traffic and determine whether specific traffic should be allowed or blocked based on the rules that have been established for the network security device.
For more than two decades, firewalls have served as the first line of defense in network security. They serve to create a barrier between trusted internal networks that have been protected and controlled and untrusted external networks such as the Internet that are not secure and regulated.
A firewall can be made of hardware, software, or a combination of the two.
Types of firewalls
Types of Firewalls and Cisco Firewall Solutions are some of the topics covered in this section.
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Proxy firewall
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Firewalls are classified into several categories.
Firewall through a proxy
A proxy firewall is an early type of firewall device that serves as a gateway from one network to another for a specific application. It is still in use today. In addition to providing additional functionality such as content caching and security, proxy servers can also provide additional functionality by prohibiting direct connections from outside the network. However, this may have an impact on the throughput capacity of the system as well as the applications that it can handle.
Stateful inspection firewall
A stateful inspection firewall, which is now referred to as a “conventional” firewall, allows or blocks traffic based on the state, the port, and the protocol. It keeps track of every action that takes place between the time a connection is established and the time it is terminated. Both administrator-defined rules and context, which refers to the use of information from prior connections as well as packets belonging to the same connection, are taken into consideration while making filtering determinations.
Unified threat management (UTM) firewall
A UTM device often combines the operations of a stateful inspection firewall with those of an intrusion prevention system and an antivirus system in a loosely connected manner. It may also incorporate extra services, such as cloud management, in some cases. UTMs place a strong emphasis on simplicity and ease of use.
Next-generation firewall (NGFW)
Next-generation firewalls are being developed (NGFW)
Firewalls have progressed beyond the fundamental packet filtering and stateful inspection that they used to perform. The majority of businesses are installing next-generation firewalls to protect themselves against modern threats such as advanced malware and application-layer attacks, among others.
Gartner, Inc. defines a next-generation firewall as one that has the following components:
Stateful inspection and other standard firewall features are included.
Intrusion detection and prevention systems that work together
Application awareness and control to identify and block potentially dangerous applications
Pathways to be upgraded to include future information feeds
Techniques for dealing with the ever-changing nature of security risks
While these features are gradually becoming the norm for most businesses, next-generation firewalls (NGFWs) are capable of much more.
threat-focused NGFW
These firewalls have all of the characteristics of a typical next-generation firewall (NGFW), as well as the ability to identify and remediate sophisticated threats. You can do the following with a threat-focused NGFW:
With total context awareness, you can identify which assets are most in danger.
Intelligent security automation, which creates policies and hardens your defenses dynamically in response to attacks, allows you to react quickly to threats.
With network and endpoint event correlation, you can more effectively detect evasive or suspicious activities.
Reduce the amount of time it takes from detection to cleaning by implementing retroactive security, which continuously monitors for suspicious activity and behavior even after the initial inspection has been completed.