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What types of network firewalls are there?

What are the different kinds of firewalls that are out there? From what I gathered, I see there are application, proxy and UTM firewalls. Are there any others? Could you tell me if they differ in any way from the ones I already know of?

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National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) 800-10 divides firewalls in to five basic types:

  1. Packet filters
  2. Stateful Inspection
  3. Proxys
  4. Dynamic
  5. Kernel
Now in reality, it's not quite that simple as most modern firewalls have a mix of abilities that place them in more than one of the categories shown above. Check out the NIST document for more details.

This was first published in November 2007

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