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What Stateless Packet Filter?

Alexander Ross • • 6 min read
What Stateless Packet Filter?

Stateless firewalls are designed to protect networks based on static information such as source and destination. Whereas stateful firewalls

stateful firewalls
PF (Packet Filter, also written pf) is a BSD licensed stateful packet filter, a central piece of software for firewalling. It is comparable to netfilter (iptables), ipfw, and ipfilter. PF was developed for OpenBSD, but has been ported to many other operating systems.
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filter packets based on the full context of a given network connection, stateless firewalls filter packets based on the individual packets themselves.

What is stateful and stateless filtering?

Stateful firewalls are capable of monitoring and detecting states of all traffic on a network to track and defend based on traffic patterns and flows. Stateless firewalls, however, only focus on individual packets, using preset rules to filter traffic.

What is difference between stateful and packet filtering?

Stateful packet inspection

While a packet filtering firewall only examines an individual packet out of context, a stateful firewall is able to watch the traffic over a given connection, generally defined by the source and destination IP addresses, the ports being used, and the already existing network traffic.

Alexander Ross
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Alexander Ross

Alexander Ross has covered the video game industry for a decade, writing deep dives on game design, esports tournaments, VR developments, and gaming culture.