22 replies to this topic

[TcM]

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

[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]

lasthell said:

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..

[morefood2001]

A hardware firewall is going to be better in the aspects of blocking all requests that you are not expecting. A scenario would be you are running a mysql server on the inside of your network and you don't want anyone from outside getting direct access to it, this request will never make it to your sql server and that server will not spend that extra time and bandwidth, even though its little on denying that request.

The advantage of a personal firewall installed on your computer is that it will monitor your requests and incoming requests at the same time. So if you request a site, the software firewall is more likely to only let that one site through and nothing else. A hardware firewall will see the request and allow whatever the response is back in completely as where a software firewall may block some of the incoming data that is could be harmful.

Its been about 3 years since I learned about the advantages and disadvantages, but if I remember right, I think I got it right.

[TcM]

Thanks for the detailed explanation :) +rep given.