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Firewall

A firewall is a barrier to keep destructive forces away from our property. It is similar to a physical firewall that keeps a fire from spreading from one area to the next. A firewall can control what kind of traffic flow across and protect the network from hackers.

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56 views3 pages

Firewall

A firewall is a barrier to keep destructive forces away from our property. It is similar to a physical firewall that keeps a fire from spreading from one area to the next. A firewall can control what kind of traffic flow across and protect the network from hackers.

Uploaded by

coolb504
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as RTF, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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FIREWALLS

INTRODUCTION :
Basically a firewall is a barrier to keep destructive forces away from our property. Its job is similar to a physical firewall that keeps a fire from spreading from one area to the next. All of us are well aware of the Internet browsing. For example, the employees of a larger company while browse the web they probably obstruct with the firewall to access certain sites. If we have a fast Internet connection in our home we might have faced the firewalls for our home networks as well. It turns that a small home network has also many of the same security issues that of larger corporate network does. We can use firewall to protect your home network and family from offensive web sites and potential hackers.

ABOUT FIREWALLS:
What are Firewalls? A fire wall is a piece of software or hardware, which stands between two entities can be private network on one side and a public network like the Internet, on the other side. They can control what kind of traffic flow across and protect the network from hackers. What it does? Lets say that a company is running with 500 employees. So the company will have hundreds of computers that all have network cards connecting them together. In addition, the company will have one or more connections to the Internet connections. Without firewall in place all of those hundreds of computers are directly accessible to anyone on the Internet. A person who knows what he or she is doing can probe those computers, try to make FTP connections to them, try to make Telnet connections to them and so on. If one employee makes a mistake and leaves a security hole, hackers can get to the machine and exploit and hole.

With a firewall in place, the landscape is much different. A company will place a firewall at every connection to the Internet. The firewall can implement security rules. For example one of the security rules inside the company might be Out of the 500 computers inside this company only 1 of them is permitted to receive public FTP traffic. Allow FTP connections only to that one computer and prevent them on all others. A company can set rules like this for FTP servers, Web servers, Telnet servers and so on. In addition the company can control how employees connect to Web sites, whether files are allowed to leave the company over the network and so on. A firewall gives a company tremendous control over how people use the network.

TYPES OF FIREWALL
Firewalls use one or more of three methods to control traffic flowing in and out of the network. They are

i. Application-filtering Firewall ii. Packet-filtering Firewall iii. Stateful Inspection i. Application-filtering Firewall: An application-proxy firewall is implemented in proxy servers. Any one wants to access anything outside the trusted network must go through the proxy server. This proxy firewall will grant or block access depending on a set of rules. The rules can be based on the user login name, source, and destination machines IP addresses, protocol in use like TCP, UDP, ICMP, Port address etc. An application proxy can block or allow access to application-specific data. For example, you can block MP3 and video files. ii. Packet-filtering Firewall:

A packet-filtering firewall controls access based on information in the packet header. As we all know, data that has to be transmitted across the network is broken into small chunks of data called packets. Each packet has header and a part of the original data, called its content. The header consists of information like source, destination, port, and number of the packet in the sequence. Packets that are analyzed against a set of filters are sent to the requesting system and all others discarded.

iii. Stateful-inspection:

This is the newer method doesn't examine the contents of each packet but instead compares certain key parts of the packet to a database of trusted information. Information traveling from inside the firewall to the outside is monitored for specific defining characteristics, and then informing information is compared to these characteristics. If the comparison yields reasonable match, the information is allowed through. Otherwise it is discarded.

APPLICATIONS OF FIREWALLS:
We have many applications of firewalls. Two of them are Operating system bugs:

Like applications, some operating systems have backdoors. Others provide remote access with insufficient security controls or have bugs that an experienced hacker can take advantage. E-mail bombs:

An e-mail bomb is usually a personal attack. Someone sends you the same e-mail hundreds or thousands of times until your e-mail system cannot accept any more messages.

CONCLUSION:
One of the best things about a firewall from a security standpoint is that it stops anyone on the outside from logging onto a computer in your private network. While this is a big deal for businesses, most home networks will probably not be threatened in this manner. Still, putting a firewall in place provides some peace of mind Day by day people are depending on Internet. It can be either for giving information or to accept information. Security is to be maintained either during transformation and also at terminal ends.

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