Greetings everyone:

I continue to see posts on WHT that appear to state firewalls and packet filtering are two separate entities (services, software, etc.).

Yet from all our security experiences, all firewalls provide packet filtering.

Are there firewalls that don't provide packet filtering?

Would you have cases where they are two separate services et all?

Thank you.

Originally posted by dynamicnet

Yet from all our security experiences, all firewalls provide packet filtering.


All firewalls provide packet filtering (as far as I know), but not all packet filters are firewalls. For instance, a router can be set up with ACLs to filter packets -- but I would not call that a firewall. Ditto, servers, which can be set up with packet filtering software, but a server is not a firewall.