The firewall which controls input, output or access to, from or by an application or services is known as an application firewall. The application firewall is generally created for the control of all network traffic or any OSI layer up to the application layer. This works by potentially blocking and monitoring the input, output or system service calls that do not follow the configured policy of the firewall.
It can control applications or services typically without extra software that is unable to control the network traffic that regards a particular form which completely differs with a stateful network firewall. There are two main types of application firewall. They are network based application firewalls and host based application firewalls. A system based application layer firewall denotes to a computer networking firewall operating at the application layer belonging to a protocol stack.
It is also known as the proxy based or a reverse proxy based firewall. They refer to a particular type of network traffic which could be entitled to the service name such as a web application firewall. They could be implemented via software implementing on a host or a stand alone sort of network hardware. It is often a host of various formas of proxy servers to proxy traffic before giving it to the server or client.
It might check the contents of traffic thus blocking specified substances such as certain websites, attempts to misuse known logical loopholes in client software since it acts on the application. The modern application firewalls might also offload encryption from servers, block application input/ output from the detected malformed communication or intrusions, consolidate or manage authentication or block contents that do not meet with the policies.
On the other hand, the distributed web application firewall is a member of the web application firewall and web application family of technology. This firewall is totally software based and is designs as a different component that can exist physically in a separate part of the network. This advancement in architecture enables the resource utilization of this firewall to be spread across a system somewhat that depend on one sector. This approach is beneficial for distributed and large visualized infrastructures such as public, private or hybrid cloud models.