Abstract
Computer and network security has a wide range of applications and most of the applications need ample security and access to the network should be restricted from intruders and anomalies. Firewalls can be considered as the best choice this process and in general the firewalls provide some access restrictions to the incoming and outgoing traffic across a network. In this research, I have reviewed the importance of firewalls and the level of technical aspects across its implementation along with the disadvantages. Different types of firewalls are reviewed in this context and presented in the analysis part.
Firewalls
In order to interconnect the internet and some private network an internet gateway is required and that internet gateway must be very secure and the firewall is nothing but a secure Internet gateway. A firewall is made up of several components and they are discussed below in detail:
a) The first among the components is the “Internet Access Security Policy” of an organization. This means that when the organization is connecting to the internet what was the expected level of security at high level. Without depending on the equipment that are used the security policy must have a life time because it is not based on the techniques and the technology that is implemented (Government of the Hong Kong, 2009). According to this statement, an instance for this type of security policy is a corporate network of an organization is not accessed by the external users that means they are not permitted use that network if not they have anauthorized authentication. If an organization require transferring its corporate information through the internet and if that information is not available in the public domain then the information is transferred in a confidential approach. And all the other external services will be banned and only the corporate users are permitted to send e-mails across the internet.
b) The other component in making the firewalls is mapping of the security policy on the procedures and technical designs, these procedures and technical designs on which the security policy is mapped must be followed and implemented while connecting to the internet. During this process the configuration of the system will be changed and the information will be added as a fresh technology and so on. Theusage of one-time passwords can be taken as example for the technical design considering the authentication of an organizational network. Generally the technical designs depends on one security policy among the two polices. The two policies are allowing any service except it is denied expressly or deny any service except it is permitted expressly. The second one is the most secure among the two security policies.
c) The third one is firewall system which is a combination of both software and hardware that means the both the software and hardware components can make the firewall. Generally a firewall system is made up of an “IP packet filtering router” and a host computer sometimes it is also called as application gateway or a bastion host which will run authentication software and application filtering.
All the above components are very important and necessary for making a firewall. A firewall is said to be not configured properly if there is no Internet access security policy. There is no value for the policy if that is not configured properly and also if is not enforced with worthy procedures.