Hardware vs Software firewalls

[TcM]

What is the best and more secure firewalls, the software or the hardware ones?

[NeedHelp]

I would say hardware since that is what they are made to do.

[TkTech]

I would say hardware, since they are the best. Nothing beats A. Its reaction speed.
B. Pipe monitor alogs ( ability to check incomming/outgoing streams of data for malicious code )
C. Physical control of a pipe ( a firewall may request a port gets shutdown from a system, but it will almost always lag a couple of seconds - there goes your bank numbers )

[TcM]

So they are best not because they are secure but because they control them selves (I mean that software controls the software side from the OS) while the hardware doesn't need any permission it acts on its own, right?

[Baldmale]

Most of the so called hardward firewall, is actucally software firewall. Just most of the kernel and other unused utilities are removed. So it will be faster and has not common problems for script kiddies to penetrate.

[TcM]

But they have a hardware device or something? So it is still hardware right?

[lasthell]

differentiating firewalls into hardware of software does not make any sense. Even if you run firewall on your local PC, it ll need dedicated hardware, right?? The firewalls which are sold as independent hardware are specifically designed so they are fast and costly, where the firewalls sold as softwares, it depends on on which system you are setting it up. So technically software plus hardware support make firewalls, it depend on your needs which type of firewall you want to buy. If you just want to plug and play go for hardware. If you have minimal requirements from firewall you can install software firewall on your gateway or proxy server.

[TcM]

Originally Posted by lasthell

it ll need dedicated hardware, right??

What dedicated hardware? It will need just the Pc resources like all the other applications...

[lasthell]

You were talking about hardware firewall, you don't use it to protect single PC but entire subnet thats why I was talking about firewall softwares which can be installed on any powerful system and used at the mouth of subnet.(Not sweet little PC firewalls which runs as an application).

[zoekmachine]

Never tried hardware firewall and can nothing say about it but software firewall is nice piece of protection against attack.
It give you totally control to set it, configure it, viewing log etc..