NGFW

A firewall adding deep inspection, application awareness, and IPS.

A next generation firewall extends traditional port and protocol filtering with deep packet inspection, application awareness, user identity integration, and an embedded intrusion prevention system. This lets it enforce policy based on the actual application rather than just port numbers and to detect threats inside allowed traffic. Many can also decrypt and inspect TLS sessions. The contrast with a stateful firewall is depth of visibility: an NGFW understands layer 7 context, while a basic firewall mainly tracks connection state at lower layers.