Question

How is an application layer firewall different from a packet-filtering firewall?

Why is an application layer firewall sometimes called a proxy server?

What is stateful inspection?

What is a VPN? Why is it becoming more widely used?

What is content filtering, and should it be leveraged on a corporate network? Backup your statement with 2 or 3 facts.

Please pick two peer posts for your responses. Do you agree with their statements on content filtering or disagree and why? Are there other angles they did not add?

Answer 1

According to chegg policy we answer four, but here I answered five

How is an application layer firewall different from a packet-filtering firewall?

A firewall is a set of rules defined for the network packets to and from the computer.The rules are defined in the firewall.

Normally the traditional firewall is the packet filtering firewall where packets are comming into the firewall, it scans the packets header and check with rules which are being set , according to that it allows or disallows the packet.
In packet filtering firewall I can block packets comming from a specific port or specific ipaddress. Packet filtering firewall are mostly configured with the routers also.

Application layer firewall is a modernized firewall which follows at the application layer of the OSI model. In this firewall it checks the messages which are comming in or out to and from the network. Say for example in application layer firewall we can stop accessing some websites in a network. It checks the whole data of the messages and based on some criteria it can stop that massage in the network.

Why is an application layer firewall sometimes called a proxy server?

Application layer firewall sometimes called a proxy server beacause the Application layer firewall are mainly applied through proxy server. The rules for the Application layer firewall are configured in the proxy. There is no specific hardware used for Application layer firewall rather they are used in the proxy server because the Application layer protocol messages like ftp, http are passed through the proxy server. So whenever a client accessed for a website the request is received by the proxy server from that is is redirected to the Internet and vice versa.
  
What is stateful inspection?

In traditional firewall it is stateless firewall means it just check the header of the firewall and follow the rule and allow the packet but statefull firewall or inspection check the whole packet from header to data means upto application layer.It tracks the the tcpip connections and check for encryption, it also follow the path of communication and then decides the rule for the packet.So it can check the authorization of the packets.

In other words we can say stateful inspection controls the series of packets over a time. It checks whether the nature of the packet are same or different from the same server over a time.

What is a VPN? Why is it becoming more widely used?

VPN is Virtual Private Network. In VPN we are extending our private network in the public network. It means that we are connecting computers in Internet by a private network. It is helpful because when we establish a network through VPN other users or hackers are not allowed to access or permitted. It is very secured and data are encrypted. It establishes a private channel in public network.

It is becomming widely used because connecting through VPN is very secure and less expensive and less risk to transfer data from one computer to other.

What is content filtering, and should it be leveraged on a corporate network? Backup your statement with 2 or 3 facts.

Content filtering means the information which are passed through the internet can be filtered. It is mostly used in corporate network because in corporate houses we only do our work not any entainment or any other thing which losses our productivity.

As for example most of corporate houses social networking are not allowed, so when we try to access any socila networking sites they are closed. Or viewing movies using our corporate network which is also not allowable. These type of access can be vlocked by content filtering.