A firewall is a security guard placed at the point of entry between a private network and the outside Internet such that all incoming and outgoing packets have to pass through it. The function of a firewall is to examine every incoming or outgoing packet and decide whether to accept or discard it. This function is conventionally specified by a sequence of rules, where rules often conflict. To resolve conflicts, the decision for each packet is the decision of the first rule that the packet matches.
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