The terms proxy firewall and gateway firewall are used synonymously. These firewalls help to maintain the transparency between the requester and server. As you know, the packet filter firewall inspects the headers of the packets, so it works at network transport layer. But to do inspection of packets at deeper level for better security, we need the proxy firewalls which works at application layer. Moreover, these firewalls are aware of the application protocol, so they provide better inspection capabilities. The Packet Filtering Firewall is one of the most basic firewalls. The first step in protecting internal users from the external network threats is to implement this type of security. The first ever firewalls used were of packet filtering type only. As the trends of network threats started changing, so did the firewall building strategies. Most of the routers have packet filtering built-in, but the problem with the routers is that, they are difficult to configure and don’t provide extensive logs of the incidents. In my previous firewall tutorials I talked about firewall policies and few other things. That information is also used while designing such firewalls. For network security there are some rules which we covered under security policy. The firewall policy is altogether different. We must say that security policy resides at conceptual level and firewall policy resides at technical implementation level and is a subset of security policy. Here I am going to discuss the firewall policy which covers theoretical implementation of network security policy. For IT security when it comes to implementation of firewall, the planning comes first. The base of planning is the security policy for your organization. The firewall should be capable enough to protect the LAN resources from harms on internet. In a recent article on introduction to firewalls, I discussed about firewall basics. Now I’m going to discuss about the desired security policy for the firewall implementation for your network. Firewall is an important and extensive tool for IT security. Writing about firewalls in depth is one of my targets for this blog on IT security. So, to set the ball rolling I’ll start with the basics of firewalls . For today I’ll start the disucssion with firewall basics.