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Stateful packet inspection
The method you are referring to is called SPI - Stateful Packet Inspection. A firewall employing SPI is commonly called a stateful firewall.
Stateful Inspection. A stateful inspection firewall uses a technique known as stateful packet filtering to keep track of communication channels. This is different when compared to basic firewalls. Once the packet and connection has been sent, a normal firewall will not remember the communication channel, whereas the stateful inspection firewall will. This also proves useful to protect connectionless communication protocols.
Stateful packet inspection
stateful packet inspection
A network hub absconds with any stateful packet inspection (SPI), so it won't act as a firewall.
A stateless firewall does not keep information about existing connections, TCP sequence numbers, and other information. It analyzes packets independently, not as part of the packet sequence.
Stateful firewall checks more than just the ACK flag;it inspects the sequence numbers to ensure the correct state of the TCP session.
Stateful Packet Inspection of the traffic entering the device. It cannot inspect on outbound traffic.
All routers provide good hardware firewalls using stateful packet inspection (SPI), but Buffalo routers are excellent in this regard.
Packet Filtering:permits or denies traffic based onsource/destination IP addresses, or TCP/UDP port numbers usingAccess Control Lists (ACLs)Stateful Packet Inspection:Tracks TCP and UDP sessions in a flowtable, using the Adaptive Security Algorithm.
Stateful inspection firewalls monitor the state of active connections and use this information to determine which network packets to allow through the firewall. This is in contrast to static packet filtering where only the headers of packets are checked. Attackers can exploit this property of static filters to sometimes get information through the firewall by doing something like indicating "reply" in the header. Stateful inspection, on the other hand, analyzes packets all the way down to the application layer of the OSI model. Stateful inspection can monitor communications packets over a period of time and examine both incoming and outgoing packets. Outgoing packets that request specific types of incoming packets are tracked and only incoming packets that are proper responses are allowed through the firewall. In a firewall that uses stateful inspection, the network administrator can set the parameters to meet specific needs, for example ports can be closed unless an incoming packet requests connection to a specific port and then only that port is opened. This practice prevents port scanning, a well-known hacking technique.