Application Proxy Gateways Sample Clauses

Application Proxy Gateways. An application-proxy gateway is a feature of advanced firewalls that combines lower-layer access control with upper-layer functionality. These firewalls contain a proxy agent that acts as an intermediary between two hosts that wish to communicate with each other and never allows a direct connection between them. Each successful connection attempt actually results in the creation of two separate connections — one between the client and the proxy server and another between the proxy server and the true destination. The proxy is meant to be transparent to the two hosts — from their perspectives there is a direct connection. Because external hosts only communicate with the proxy agent, internal IP addresses are not visible to the outside world. The proxy agent interfaces directly with the firewall ruleset to determine whether a given instance of network traffic should be allowed to transit the firewall.