The following is a comparison of notable firewalls, starting from simple home firewalls up to the most sophisticated Enterprise-level firewalls.
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Firewall software
Ultimately, all firewalls are software-based, but some firewall solutions are provided as software solutions that run on general purpose operating systems. The following table lists different firewall software that can be installed / configured in different general purpose operating systems.
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Firewall appliances
In general, a computer appliance is a computing device with a specific function and limited configuration ability, and a software appliance is a set of computer programs that might be combined with just enough operating system (JeOS) for it to run optimally on industry standard computer hardware or in a virtual machine.
A firewall appliance is a combination of a firewall software and an operating system that is purposely built to run a firewall system on a dedicated hardware or virtual machine. These include:
- embedded firewalls: very limited-capability programs running on a low-power CPU system,
- software-based firewall appliances: a system that can be run in independent hardware or in a virtualised environment as a virtual appliance
- hardware-based firewall appliances: a firewall appliance that runs on a hardware specifically built to install as a network device, providing enough network interfaces and CPU to serve a wide range of purposes. From protecting a small network (a few network ports and few megabits per second throughput) to protecting an enterprise-level network (tens of network ports and gigabits per second throughput).
The following table lists different firewall appliances.
Firewall rule-set Appliance-UTM filtering features comparison
Firewall rule-set advanced features comparison
Firewall's other features comparison
Non-Firewall extra features comparison
Those features are not strictly firewall features, but are sometimes bundled with firewall software, or exist on the platform.
NOTE: Features are marked "yes" even if implemented as a separate module that comes with the platform on which firewall sits.
IDS: real-time firewall that logs/sniffs/blocks suspicious connections that are not part of rule-set.
VPN (Virtual Private Network) Types are: PPTP, L2TP, MPLS, IPsec, SSL/SSH.
Profile selection: The user can switch between sets of firewall settings, e.g. for use at work, at home, and on public connections.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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