The term firewall/fireblock originally meant a wall to confine a fire or potential fire within a building; cf. firewall (construction). Later uses refer to similar structures, such as the metal sheet separating the engine compartment of a vehicle or aircraft from the passenger compartment.
Firewall technology emerged in the late 1980s when the Internet was a fairly new technology in terms of its global use and connectivity. The predecessors to firewalls for network security were the routers used in the late 1980s to separate networks from one another.[1] The view of the Internet as a relatively small community of compatible users who valued openness for sharing and collaboration was ended by a number of major internet security breaches which occurred in the late 1980s:[1]
- Clifford Stoll's discovery of German spies tampering with his system[1]
- Bill Cheswick's "Evening with Berferd" 1992 in which he set up a simple electronic jail to observe an attacker[1]
- In 1988, an employee at the NASA Ames Research Center in California sent a memo by email to his colleagues [2] that read, "We are currently under attack from an Internet VIRUS! It has hit Berkeley, UC San Diego, Lawrence Livermore, Stanford, and NASA Ames."
- The Morris Worm spread itself through multiple vulnerabilities in the machines of the time. Although it was not malicious in intent, the Morris Worm was the first large scale attack on Internet security; the online community was neither expecting an attack nor prepared to deal with one.[3]
First generation: packet filters
The first paper published on firewall technology was in 1988, when engineers from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) developed filter systems known as packet filter firewalls. This fairly basic system was the first generation of what became a highly evolved and technical internet security feature. At AT&T Bell Labs, Bill Cheswick and Steve Bellovin were continuing their research in packet filtering and developed a working model for their own company based upon their original first generation architecture.
Packet filters act by inspecting the "packets" which represent the basic unit of data transfer between computers on the Internet. If a packet matches the packet filter's set of rules, the packet filter will drop (silently discard) the packet, or reject it (discard it, and send "error responses" to the source).
This type of packet filtering pays no attention to whether a packet is part of an existing stream of traffic (it stores no information on connection "state"). Instead, it filters each packet based only on information contained in the packet itself (most commonly using a combination of the packet's source and destination address, its protocol, and, for TCP and UDP traffic, the port number).
TCP and UDP protocols comprise most communication over the Internet, and because TCP and UDP traffic by convention uses well known ports for particular types of traffic, a "stateless" packet filter can distinguish between, and thus control, those types of traffic (such as web browsing, remote printing, email transmission, file transfer), unless the machines on each side of the packet filter are both using the same non-standard ports.
Packet filtering firewalls work on the first three layers of the OSI reference model, which means all the work is done between the network and physical layers. When a packet originates from the sender and filters through a firewall, the device checks for matches to any of the packet filtering rules that are configured in the firewall and drops or rejects the packet accordingly. When the packet passes through firewall it filters the packet on a protocol/port number basis (GSS). For example if a rule in the firewall exists to block telnet access, then the firewall will block the IP protocol for port number 23.
Second generation: application layer
The key benefit of application layer filtering is that it can "understand" certain applications and protocols (such as File Transfer Protocol, DNS, or web browsing), and it can detect if an unwanted protocol is sneaking through on a non-standard port or if a protocol is being abused in any harmful way.
An application firewall is much more secure and reliable compared to packet filter firewalls because it works on all seven layers of the OSI reference model, from the application down to the physical Layer. This is similar to a packet filter firewall but here we can also filter information on the basis of content. The best example of an application firewall is ISA (Internet Security and Acceleration) server. An application firewall can filter higher-layer protocols such as FTP, Telnet, DNS, DHCP, HTTP, TCP, UDP and TFTP (GSS). For example, if an organization wants to block all the information related to "foo" then content filtering can be enabled on the firewall to block that particular word. This is a software-based firewall and thus it is much slower than a stateful firewall.
Third generation: "stateful" filters
From 1989-1990 three colleagues from AT&T Bell Laboratories, Dave Presetto, Janardan Sharma, and Kshitij Nigam, developed the third generation of firewalls, calling them circuit level firewalls.
Third-generation firewalls, in addition to what first- and second-generation look for, regard placement of each individual packet within the packet series. This technology is generally referred to as a stateful packet inspection as it maintains records of all connections passing through the firewall and is able to determine whether a packet is the start of a new connection, a part of an existing connection, or is an invalid packet. Though there is still a set of static rules in such a firewall, the state of a connection can itself be one of the criteria which trigger specific rules.
This type of firewall can help prevent attacks which exploit existing connections, or certain Denial-of-service attacks.
Subsequent developments
In 1992, Bob Braden and Annette DeSchon at the University of Southern California (USC) were refining the concept of a firewall. The product known as "Visas" was the first system to have a visual integration interface with colors and icons, which could be easily implemented and accessed on a computer operating system such as Microsoft's Windows or Apple's MacOS. In 1994 an Israeli company called Check Point Software Technologies built this into readily available software known asFireWall-1.
The existing deep packet inspection functionality of modern firewalls can be shared by Intrusion-prevention systems (IPS).
Currently, the Middlebox Communication Working Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is working on standardizing protocols for managing firewalls and other middleboxes.
Another axis of development is about integrating identity of users into Firewall rules. Many firewalls provide such features by binding user identities to IP or MAC addresses, which is very approximate and can be easily turned around. The NuFW firewall provides real identity-based firewalling, by requesting the user's signature for each connection
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