Friday, August 6, 2010

Why Proxies and Firewalls are Important

In building construction, a firewall is a structure designed to integrate building fires. For example, an attic crawlspace that covers the entire length of the building would allow a fire to roar from one end of the building to the other. Breaking up the crawlspace with non-flammable walls assists to slow the disseminate of a fire.


Network firewalls have a similar function. A firewall is a network security scheme, either a program or a really device, that breaks up a network to comprise viruses and hackers.


Imagine two big fish tanks side by side, split up by a wall. We want to concede the blue fish to mingle, but we require to keep the carnivorous fish on the left away from the baby fish on the right. If we opened a computer-controlled door in the wall, programmed to only concede blue fish to pass but no one else, that would be a fishtank firewall.


Network firewalls 'segment" the network. Local traffic—the selective information that moves amidst the computers in that segment—doesn't go through the firewall to the more prominent network outside. And data that doesn't need to reach any individual inside the firewall is blocked out, just like the carnivorous fish in our example.


A Proxy is yet another network security tool. Proxies are replacements for Internet servers. When a computer requests a internet-location from the internet, a main hub provides the IP address. A firewall can interfere with this, and declare that no one inside the firewall may surf the Internet. The Proxy is then the "official" way past the firewall.


A proxy server has a list of "authorized" internet sites. When the user's computer requests the address from the Internet, the proxy checks it against the list, and whether or not the web site is approved, it authorizes the firewall to let the traffic through. If the site is not approved, then the firewall sends a message saying "you are not authoritative to visit this web-site. "

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