- What Is a Firewall?
- What a Firewall Cannot Do
- An Overview of Firewall Security Technologies
- What Kind of Firewall Is FireWall-1?
- Do You Really Need FireWall-1?
- More Information
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
What Kind of Firewall Is FireWall-1?
Check Point advertises FireWall-1 as primarily a Stateful Inspection firewall. Although this is certainly FireWall-1's biggest strength, FireWall-1 uses both Stateful Inspection and application proxies. Application proxies are used when content security or user authentication is necessary for HTTP, Telnet, rlogin, FTP, and SMTP. Stateful Inspection is used for all other security functions. To be fair, most commercial and even homegrown firewalls employ some combination of these two technologies because none of the technologies can provide all the necessary functionality.
FireWall-1 also offers some other interesting capabilities, many of which are covered in future chapters:
-
Site-to-site VPNs
-
Client-to-site VPNs
-
Content filtering (with the help of third-party products)
-
Address translation
-
Authentication (integrated with third-party authentication servers)
-
Enterprise-wide policy management
-
High availability (with the help of third-party products)
-
INSPECT, a language with which you can modify Check Point's Stateful Inspection engine