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It is a type of firewall that monitors the status of active network connections while analyzing incoming packets for potential threats.Įssential firewall functions include preventing malicious traffic from entering or leaving the private network. Hardware firewalls, on the other hand, are physical devices.Ī stateful firewall is located at Layer 3 (source and destination IP addresses) and Layer 4 (Transmission Control Protocol/TCP and User Datagram Protocol/UDP) of the OSI model. Software firewalls are applications or programs installed on devices. We are going to define them and describe the main differences, including both their advantages and disadvantages.Ī firewall can be a software firewall, a hardware firewall, or a combination of both. We will elaborate stateful firewalls, stateless or packet-filtering firewalls, application-level gateway firewalls, and next-generation firewalls. This article will dig deeper into the most common type of network firewalls.
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