Talk:Stateless firewall

The FTP example is talking about application-awareness, which is not quite the same thing as statefullness. Stateful filtering is first of all about telling whether a packet is part of an ongoing connection (between the same ports and addresses). A stateless filter would not know about the connection (but could approach this functionality by filtering out connection setup requests in tcp [SYN/ACK set] -- udp would be more of a problem). When a single "conversation", like an ftp session, includes several connections between different ports, typically the firewall must become aware of the details of the protocol. Must tidy this up (unless someone beats me to it... please do!)

- Paul