Q12Information Security Systems
Question
4 marks
Describe the different types of firewalls and their specific use cases.
Answer
Firewalls filter network traffic based on predefined security rules.
Firewalls establish a barrier between trusted internal networks and untrusted external networks. Packet-filtering firewalls operate at the network layer, checking IPs and ports against a ruleset. Stateful inspection firewalls track the active state of connections, providing deeper security. Proxy (Application-level) firewalls act as intermediaries, inspecting application layer payloads to filter out advanced threats. Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFW) combine these features with deep packet inspection and intrusion prevention capabilities.