Networking / Beginners

Types of firewalls

There are different implementations of firewalls that can be arranged in different ways. The various firewall implementations are discussed next and example policies are presented. Table below depicts several firewall architectures and their ratings, as they would apply to low, medium-risk, and high-risk processing environments.

Firewall Security Risk

Firewall Architecture (If any one of these is being implemented)High Risk Environment (Hospital)Medium Risk Environment (Hospital)Low Risk Environment (Hospital)
Packet filtering
Application Gateways
Hybrid Gateways
0
3
4
1
4
3
4
2
2

Note: The rating numbers for various firewall types are as follows: 4, recommended choice; 3, effective option; 2, acceptable; 1, minimal security; 0, unacceptable.

Caution: Actually, universities are very often the targets of attacks and should be considered high risk. They have extremely large conduits to the Internet that, if accessed, can be very desirable and advantageous to pirates for the purpose of launching effective, large scale attacks against industrial/commercial locations such as banks and e-commerce operations.

  • Packet filtering
  • Application gateways
  • Hybrid gateways1
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