From the course: Protecting Your Network with Open-Source Software

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Understanding an application proxy firewall

Understanding an application proxy firewall

From the course: Protecting Your Network with Open-Source Software

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Understanding an application proxy firewall

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- [Instructor] Squid is an open-source application proxy firewall software solution for hypertext transfer protocol, or HTTP. It has many features, but we'll focus on the website blocking functionality. What is an application proxy firewall? Static packet filtering, or SPF, and staple packet inspection, or SPI firewalls, do not inspect application data in a network packet. They only look at the headers of the network packets. They should also inspect the payload or content of the packets. It's simply too much data to handle for these SPF and SPI firewalls. This is why we need a specialized firewall solution dedicated to looking at only the data segment of the packets. Therefore, application proxy firewalls focus on examining the application data delivered by each network packet. One more thing to note is that these application proxy firewalls are also application or protocol-specific. In the case of Squid, its specialty is HTTP. Here's a diagram we can use to think more deeply about…

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