FireWall-1

FireWall-1 is a firewall product created by Check Point Software Technologies Ltd.

The FireWall-1 is a stateful firewall which also filters traffic by inspecting the application layer. It was the first commercially available software firewall to use stateful inspection. FireWall-1 functionality is currently bundled within all the Check Point's perimeter security products. The product previously known as FireWall-1 is now sold as an inseparable part of the VPN-1 solutions, which include the VPN functionality.

Check Point was the market leader for firewalls in the late 1990's but by 2002 it had been overtaken in market share by Cisco's PIX firewall. [ [http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/45717/45717.htm Firewall and VPN Top Level Selected Products: Directory & Buyer’s Guide] These reports don't just take into account PIX, they actually count all routers (with IP security pack) and VPN concentrators. If you consider only dedicated firewall devices, Check Point is still the market #1.]

FireWall-1 is one of the few firewall products that is still owned by its creators (Check Point Software Technologies). By contrast, most other commercial firewalls such as Cisco PIX and Juniper NetScreen were acquired by their present owners.

Platforms

Check Point FireWall-1/VPN-1 software is installed on a separate operating system, which provides the protocol stack, file system, process scheduling and other features needed by the product. This is different from most other commercial firewall products like Cisco PIX and Juniper NetScreen where the firewall software is part of a proprietary operating system.

As of NGX R61—R65, FireWall-1 supports the following operating systems:
* Solaris on SPARC 8, 9 and 10;
* Windows 2000 Server and 2003 Server;
* Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) version 3.0;
* Check Point SecurePlatform (a Check Point Linux distribution based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, often called "SPLAT");
* Nokia IPSO.

Previous versions of Check Point firewall supported other operating systems including HP-UX and IBM AIX. See the table in the "Version History" section below for details.

FireWall-1/VPN-1 running on the Nokia platform on IPSO is often called a "Nokia Firewall" as if it were a different product, but in fact it runs the same FireWall-1 software as other platforms.

Version History

The FireWall-1 version naming can be rather confusing because Check Point have changed the version numbering scheme several times through the product's history. Initially, the product used a traditional decimal version number such as 3.0, 4.0 and 4.1 (although 4.1 was also called "Check Point 2000" on the packaging). Then the version changed to "NG" meaning "Next Generation" and minor revisions became known as "Feature Packs". Then the name changed to "NG AI" which meant NG with "Application Intelligence", and the minor revisions became known as Rxx e.g. "NG AI R54". Most recently, the version name has changed to "NGX".

The product is licensed in several variants. In the decimal releases, the license determined what encryption strength was available for the VPN (DES or "Strong"). Since NG, the license always includes Strong cryptographic capabilities and was instead split into VPN-1 Pro or VPN-1 Express. VPN-1 Express was intended for simplified deployment while VPN-1 Pro provided more configurability. In NGX R62, the branding was changed to VPN-1 Power (instead of Pro) and VPN-1 UTM (instead of Express). VPN-1 UTM includes certain content inspection features such as antivirus and more recently, web filtering.

Version 3.0 was also sold by Sun Microsystems as "Solstice FireWall-1". This was essentially the same product, but with slightly different packaging and file system layout.

The table below shows the version history. The "Platforms" column shows the operating systems that are supported by the firewall product:

ee also

*VPN-1 Edge

References

External links

* [http://www.checkpoint.com www.checkpoint.com] — Check Point Software Technologies web site
** [http://www.checkpoint.com/products/firewall-1/ FireWall-1] — information about the product although it is not being sold separately anymore.
** [http://www.checkpoint.com/products/vpn-1_utm/ VPN-1 UTM] — UTM product version for small and medium business
** [http://www.checkpoint.com/products/vpn-1_power/ VPN-1 Power] — version for enterprise business
** [http://www.checkpoint.com/products/vpn-1_utm_power/ VPN-1 UTM Power] — UTM product version for enterprise business
* [http://www.fw-1.de/aerasec/ www.fw-1.de] — information about VPN-1
* [http://forums.checkpoint.com Check Point Official Forums]
* [http://www.cpug.org/ CPUG: The Check Point User Group]
* [http://www.nta-monitor.com/wiki/index.php/Check_Point_Firewall-1 Check Point IPsec IKE Implementation details]