A firewall is a filtering system that grants the firewall administrator the ability to create certain filter rules that determine what kind of traffic is allowed to cross the firewall. This paper examines the many different types of filtering that can be applied to traffic that goes through a firewall and how these have been implemented in practice. The actual filtering is only part of what a firewall must do; the firewall must also be able to report back to the firewall administrator various items of information, such as any blocked traffic. Seven different firewall products are examined to see how the different design decisions the various vendors have made affect the implementation of certain filtering functionality.
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