A Review paper on pfsense – an Open source firewall introducing with different capabilities & customization

Computer Engineering

Network Security is a crucial aspect in network management with many formation around the world spend millions each year to safeguard valuable corporate data and information. Many companies use firewalls and encryption mechanisms as security diamention. Although there are many types of firewalls and encryption mechanisms in the market, not all are suitable for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). For SMEs, these operations might be an overkill, both financially and functionally. For proper and centralized control and management, range of security features need to be integrated into unified security package One of the most efficient solution will be carried out by an open source firewall. In this paper we are carried out a case study of different existing features of an open source pfSense, a firewall on FreeBSD operating system such as, a comprehensive network security solution which integrates all of the security services such as firewall, URL filtering, virtual private networking etc in a single appliance, Captive Portal and Active Directory for managing user authentication for wireless network, analyse the logs to make network infrastructure more secure, layer 7 capabilities providing a powerful solution to control traffic based on application patterns and lastly used as a tool with other different open source tool will work well together in detecting and disabling network attacks.

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