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Firewalls - Advantages & Disadvantages

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Category: Cybersecurity PRISM
Every security device has advantages and disadvantages and firewalls are no different.
 
If we applied strict defensive mechanisms into our network to protect it from breach, then it might be possible that even our legitimate communication could malfunction, or if we allow entire protocol communications into our network, then it can be easily hacked by malicious users. So, we should maintain a balance between strictly-coupled and loosely-coupled functionalities.
 
 

Advantages

  • A firewall is an intrusion detection mechanism. Firewalls are specific to an organization’s security policy. The settings of firewalls can be altered to make pertinent modification to the firewall functionality.
  • Firewalls can be configured to bar incoming traffic to POP and SNMP and to enable email access.
  • Firewalls can also block email services to secure against spam.
  • Firewalls can be used to restrict access to specific services. For example, the firewall can grant public access to the web server but prevent access to the telnet and the other non-public daemons.
  • Firewall verifies the incoming and outgoing traffic against firewall rules. It acts as a router in moving data between networks.
  • Firewalls are excellent auditors. Given plenty of disk or remote logging capabilities, they can log any and all traffic that passes through.

Disadvantages

  • A firewall can’t prevent revealing sensitive information through social engineering.
  • Firewall can’t protect against what has been authorized. Firewalls permit normal communications of approved applications, but if those applications themselves have flaws, a firewall will not stop the attack because to the firewall, the communication is authorized.
  • Firewalls are only as effective as the rules they are configured to enforce.
  • Firewalls can’t stop attacks if the traffic does not pass through them.
  • Firewalls also can’t secure against tunneling attempts. Applications that are secure can be Trojaned. Tunneling bad things over HTTP, SMTP and other protocols is quite simple and easily demonstrated.

Types of Firewalls

The way a firewall provides greater protection relies on the firewall itself, and on the policies that are configured on it. The main firewall technologies available today are:
  1. Hardware Firewall
  2. Software Firewall
  3. Packet-Filter Firewall
  4. Proxy Firewall
  5. Application Gateways
  6. Circuit-Level Gateways
  7. Stateful Packet-Inspection (SPI)

 

This Article Was Written & published by Meena R,  Senior Manager - IT, at Luminis Consulting Services Pvt. Ltd, India. 

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