An application firewall filters access to a computer or network, protecting against vulnerabilities and malicious requests. It can conflict with legitimate software, but can be bypassed or used with antivirus and proxy servers for added security.
An application firewall is a feature designed to filter access to a computer or network. Used in computer security, a firewall can be hardware or software, and is sometimes a combination of the two. Application firewalls are software programs that identify and control the origin of requests to and from a computer application or service. Most often used to protect users from Internet threats, web application firewall programs can also be used to prevent hacker attacks. Examples of application firewall programs include AppArmor® from Novell®, Netscaler® from Citrix®, and dotDefender® from Applicure Technologies®.
An important part of computer security, an application firewall protects a computer by fighting vulnerabilities in an application. If an application’s security is not checked, weaknesses in the software and malicious programming code could allow hackers to access your computer files or cause damage to your computer. Application security is a field of work that focuses on the design and maintenance of software programs to prevent and fix security problems in a computer program.
While application firewalls can keep malicious software and computer intruders at bay, using them can also conflict with software programs legitimately running on a computer. To eliminate software conflicts with a firewall, many application firewall programs have settings that allow approved computer programs to bypass the firewall. When an application firewall does not have bypass settings, it may be necessary to close the program running the firewall for the conflicting software program to run properly. The firewall can be restarted after closing the conflicting program.
When the function of an application firewall focuses on requests to and from the Internet, they are called a web application firewall (WAF). One of the responsibilities of an application firewall is to protect a computer from malicious requests by identifying malicious Internet requests and bad data sources. A firewall can also protect an application from capturing or executing passwords or Trojan horse attacks by hackers.
Typically, application firewalls are designed to protect a program or set of programs from tampering and do not offer a comprehensive Internet security package. For added security, application firewalls are often used in conjunction with an antivirus program and a proxy server. A proxy server is a hardware device or software program that intercepts requests sent to and from another computer over a network or the Internet. Using a proxy server can help protect an Internet user’s anonymity by providing proxy server information instead of user information.
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