Re: Firewall vs. IPS - Differences now (ISS, Intrushield 2.1?)

[Ron Gula <rgula () tenablesecurity com>]

At 02:46 AM 8/16/2004 +0000, you wrote:


> Things are getting a little confusing. ISS claims that its Proventia boxes 
> are also firewallas. Intrushield 2.1 has firewall/layer 4 filtering 
> capabilities now. If the Intrushield box layer 4 acls now then what makes 
> it not be equal to a firewall? What does a firewall do that an IPS doesn't 
> as long as the IPS can do layer-4 access lists? Any info is apprecaited.

It depends on how strict you want to be with a definition of a firewall.
On one hand, anything that can filter packets based on IP, TCP, .etc
(like a router) can be thought of as a firewall. On the other hand,
most enterprise firewalls perform services such as VPN termination,
user authentication, usage reporting, routing, DNS/web proxy, .etc.

I think it's great that the IPS guys are adding in ACLs and wished
they would have done this sort of thing from the start so we could
have avoided the big IDS vs. IPS debate.

Ron Gula, CTO
Tenable Network Security
http://www.tenablesecurity.com


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