Transparent Firewalls
A firewall in terms of traditional network configurations serves as a default gateway for hosts connecting to one of its secured subnets. A transparent firewall acts like a “stealth firewall” and it is actually a Layer 2 firewall. In order to implement this, the connection of the security equipment is made to same network on both the internal and external ports. However, there is a separate VLAN for each interface.
Now let’s discuss the characteristics of transparent firewall mode:
- Transparent firewall mode supports outside interface and an inside interface.
- The best thing about transparent firewall mode is that it can run in both the single and multiple context modes.
- Instead of routing table lookups the MAC lookups are performed.