They come within a secure, hardened OS that you can install in a shell of your choice – a bare metal appliance, a public cloud environment, or a private, virtualized shell. These are comprehensive firewall solutions (services and the configuration interface) that exist independent of Netfilter, iptables, etc. The utility lets you configure these zones further, set up custom zones, and enforce more granular policies as per your needs.

The pre-built firewall will already impose some default firewall zones, like a trusted zone, a demilitarized zone, or a block zone. You could configure these manually or install an additional utility that reveals the service’s full functionalities, simplified configurations and enables point-and-click setup. Linux firewall utilities sit on top of pre-built firewall services such as Netfilter, UFW, FirewallD, iptables, etc.

Therefore, you can have two types of Linux firewall: 1. Most Linux distributions, including Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, etc., ship with pre-built firewall services of their own (much like Microsoft Windows has Windows Defender firewall turned on by default).

Top 10 Linux Firewall Solutions in 2021Ī Linux firewall is a solution or service that regulates, protects, and blocks network traffic as it passes to and from a Linux-based environment.

Key Must-have Features for Linux Firewalls.

Let’s understand the basics of a Linux firewall and look at the best products in the market in 2021. Given that nearly 75% of the world’s servers run on Linux, these solutions are essential to provide secure access to users and end customers. A Linux firewall is defined as a solution or service that regulates, protects, and blocks network traffic as it passes to and from a Linux-based environment.

Firewall solutions