When considering stateful vs. stateless firewalls, the distinction between the two approaches may sound minor but is actually quite significant.

Stateless firewalls, one of the oldest and most basic firewall architectures, were the standard at the advent of the firewall. Originally described as packet-filtering firewalls, this name is misleading because both stateless firewalls and stateful firewalls perform packet filtering, just in different ways and levels of complexity. For example, stateful firewalls inspect the packet payload, while stateless firewalls only inspect the packet protocol header.

Published July 2020 in SearchSecurity
Read the full article: Stateful vs. stateless firewalls: Understanding the differences