Discussion – Firewall Setup
Scenario – Packet filtering firewalls have been around a long time and operate at the network layer of the OSI Model, “although the transport layer is used to obtain the source and destination port number.” (Lutkevich 2021) I like to think of the packet filtering firewalls as the judges of a beauty contest because they have the power to approve or deny a packet’s access to a network simply due to its appearance by looking at the packet’s header, “the initial portion of a packet or a frame. The header contains control information such as addressing, routing, and protocol version” (Network Encyclopedia 2022) and dropping the packet if that information does not conform to the firewall’s ruleset.
According to Sunny Valley Networks, a “packet filtering firewall permits or denies network packets based on the following specifications:
Source IP address: The address from which the packet is being sent.
Destination IP address: The destination address of the packet.
Protocol: The session and application protocols that are used to transfer data (TCP, UDP, ICMP).
Ports: Source and destination ports, ICMP types, and codes.
Flags: Flags in the TCP header, such as whether the packet is a connect request.
Direction: Incoming or outgoing.
Interface: Which physical interface (NIC) the packet is traversing” (Sunny Valley Networks 2022)
The packet-filtering firewall is “effective, but because it processes each packet in isolation, it can be vulnerable to IP spoofing attacks and has largely been replaced by stateful inspection firewalls.” (Lutkevich 2021) Firewalls, in general, are literally the first layer of defense in protecting the network from unauthorized access. They protect your network from an outside threat, allow for blocking certain IP Addresses and locations, limit bandwidth usage for certain programs, and offer protection from malicious code. (Cyber Management Alliance 2022)
Questions:
Analyze the Packet-filtering firewall as described above and Reasoning on how packet-filtering add to network security.
