The primary function of a firewall ruleset is to permit or deny network traffic using packet header information in a process where each packet is typically matched against the firewall ruleset. The primary criteria used to decide whether a packet conforms to security policy or not are source IP address, source port (if the packet is a TCP or UDP packet), destination IP address, and destination port. Firewall appliances rely on the use of internal mechanisms (packet inspection, state tables, parallelization) to perform their tasks, which often slow down the delivery of network traffic. This video describes how a firewall impacts TCP traffic, and ways the Science DMZ design can deliver the same functionality without the use of a firewall.
- E. Dart, L. Rotman, B. Tierney, M. Hester and J. Zurawski, "The Science DMZ: A network design pattern for data-intensive science," 2013 SC - International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC), Denver, CO, 2013, pp. 1-10. doi: 10.1145/2503210.2503245
- ESnet Fasterdata Knowledge Base
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