Conventional and next generation firewalls in network security and its applications

A firewall acts as a security device to prevent unauthorized access and protection of data from malicious activities in a private network connection. It has become a necessary part of network security in organizations. This paper reviews conventional and next generation firewalls in the field of network security. Traditional firewall is known to provide protection to the network on the basis of ports, state and protocols and traffic is filtered according to predefined rules whereas next generation firewall focuses on providing protection against latest and advanced malware. Both traditional and NGFW support packet filtering whereas NGFW also supports VPN for more secure communication. Need of firewall, it’s working, important security zones and flow of traffic in firewall has also been elaborated through this review. Traditional firewall provides protection against attacks from the internet but attackers scrutinize vulnerabilities inside the network by targeting less protected web servers. For this distributed firewall architecture is required that provides security against insider attacks. Distributed firewall has centralized capabilities and allow fine gain access control. This paper presents the comparative analysis between conventional and next generation firewall and various advantages and disadvantages of conventional firewall. This paper also discusses the introduction of NAT firewall which allows all the devices in an internal network to share the same gateway to the external network whereas in PAT firewall port number is assigned instead of IP address to the private network.