How Does Firewall Works







Que: How does Firewall Works? or Explain Working Technique of Firewall.
Ans:
How do firewalls work?
Ø  Firewalls enforce the established security policies through a variety of security policies through a variety of mechanisms.
o   NAT(network address translation)
o   Basic packet filtering
o   Stateful packet filtering
o   ACLs
o   Application layer proxies
NAT:-
Ø  It allows you to mask significant amounts of information from outside of network.
Ø  It allows an outside entity to communicate with an entity inside the firewall without truly knowing its address.
Ø  It is technique of IPv4 to bind private IP address to public address.
Ø  NAT can assist in security by preventing direct access to devices from outside the firm, without first having address change at NAT devices.
Ø  Benefit is that fewer public IP address are needed and from a security point of view the internal address structure is not known to outside world.
Ø  If a hacker attacks the source address he is simply attacking the NAT device, not actual sender of packet.

Basic packet filtering:-
Ø  It involves looking at packets their ports, protocols, source and destination addresses and checking that information against the rules configured on firewall.
Ø  For Example, telnet and FTP connections may be prohibited from being established to mail or dB server but they may be allowed for respective service servers.
Ø  It is simple method of filtering based on information in each packet header such as IP address and TCP/UDP ports.
Ø  It will not detect and catch all undesired packets but it is fast and efficient.

Stateful packet filtering:-
Ø  It means that firewall maintains context on conversation.
Ø  Means it will look all packets.
Ø  Traffic from an outside server to an inside server may be allowed if it is requested but blocked if it is not.
Ø  Example, request for a web page.
Ø  Advance firewalls employ stateful packet filtering to prevent several types of undesired communication.
Ø  Disadvantage is that it takes significant resources and processing to perform this type of monitoring and reduces efficiency and requires more robust and expensive hardware.

Application layer proxies:-
Ø  Here packets are not allowed to traverse the firewall but data instead flows up to an application that in turn decides what to do with it.
Ø  Example, SMTP proxy may accept inbound mail from the internet and forward it to the internal corporate mail server.
Ø  While proxies provide a high level of security by making it very difficult for an attacker to manipulate the actual packets arriving at the destination.


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