Sometimes, the problems we experience with computers are a result of a legacy design. Hardware or software might have been architected 10 or 20 years ago when the world of computing was vastly different from the way it is today. As a result, the product in use today isn't as effective as it could be because of aging or obsolete design.
Such is the case of the traditional firewall, whose design dates back two decades to the late 1980s. Early firewalls consisted of packet filtering software that inspected all traffic coming into and going out of a network. If a packet of data met specific rules, its transmission was simply dropped. Later generations of firewalls were engineered to approve specific applications or to look for Internet traffic using specific ports. These legacy firewalls were built on the assumption that an application would respect its protocol which would respect the port. For example, Port 80 must mean HTTP and that must mean Web browsing. Or, Port 25 must mean SMTP and that must mean e-mail.
Podcast: Better security for your applications
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