8 Open Source Firewalls to Secure Your BUSINESS

There are lots of freely available firewalls in the open source world, which provide enough features for basic network protection. Here are 8 worth checking out.

There is a dark side of the internet which is full of hackers and spammers and you must protect your business networks by implementing reliable firewalls. The developer of security products and commercial firewalls are mostly built on an open source operating system like Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. From tiny embedded security products to giant enterprise firewall all are using customized open source operating system as their base OS. There are dozens of open source firewall application available with community support. Here in this article, we’ve identified some most popular open source firewalls that can turned your commodity hardware into a full fledged Firewall system.

1.IPCop

IPCop is an Open Source Linux firewall distribution, It is a stable, secure, user-friendly and highly configurable Firewall management system. IPCop provides a well-designed web interface to manage the firewall. It’s very useful and good for Small businesses and Local PCs. It can turn your Old PC as a secure VPN to provide a secure environment over the internet.

Key Features

• Monitor and show the performance Graphics for CPU, Memory, and Disk as well as Network throughput.
• Provide logs.
• Multiple language support.
• Provides very secure stable and easily implementable upgrade and add on patches.

2.Shorewall

Shorewall or Shoreline Firewall is another very popular Open source firewall specialized for GNU/Linux. It is built upon the Netfilter system built into the Linux kernel that also supports IPV6.

Key Features

• Tracking facilities for stateful packet filtering.
• Centralized firewall Administration.
• A GUI interface with Webmin control Panel.
• Multiple ISP support.
• Supports Masquerading, VPN, and port forwarding.

3.SmoothWall & Smoothwall Express

Smoothwall Express is based on the Linux operating system. Smoothwall is configured via a web-based GUI and requires absolutely no knowledge of Linux to install or use. A freely distributable version of SmoothWall is knows as SmoothWall Express.

Key Features

• Supports a wide variety of network cards, modems, and other hardware
• Real Time content filtering
• Manage and configure the software using a web browser
• Run efficiently on older, cheaper hardware
• Develop a supportive user community
• Traffic stats management on per IP, interfaces and visit basis
• Backup and restoration facility like.

4.pfSense

pfSense is a very reliable firewall for FreeBSD servers. It's based on the concept of Stateful Packet filtering. It offers wide ranges of feature which you might be found only in some expensive commercial firewalls only.

Key Features

• Highly configurable and upgraded from its Web – based interface.
• Can be deployed as a perimeter firewall, router, DHCP & DNS server.
• Configured as wireless access point and a VPN endpoint.
• Traffic shaping and Real Time information about the server.
• Inbound and Outbound load balancing.

5.IPFire

IPFire is another open source Linux based firewalls for Small Office, Home Office (SOHO) environments. It's designed with modularity and highly flexibility. IPfire community also took care of Security and developed it as a Stateful Packet Inspection(SPI) firewall.

Key Features

• Can be deployed as a firewall, a proxy server or a VPN gateway.
• Content filtering
• Inbuilt Intrusion detection system
• Supports through Wiki, forums and Chats
• Support hypervisors like KVM, VmWare, and Xen for Virtualization environment.

6.Endian

Endian firewall is another Stateful packet Inspection concept based firewall which can be deployed as routers, proxy and Gateway VPN with OpenVPN. It's originally developed from IPCop firewall which is also a fork of Smoothwall.

Key Features

• Bidirectional firewall
• Snort Intrusion prevention
• Can secure web server with HTTP &FTP proxies, antivirus and URL blacklist.
• Can secure Mail servers with SMTP and POP3 proxies, Spam Auto-learning, Greylisting.
• VPN with IPSec
• Real-time Network traffic logging

7.ConfigServer Security 

Configserver security and firewall is a cross-platform and a very versatile Firewall, it’s also based on the concept of Stateful packet inspection (SPI) Firewall. It supports almost all Virtualization environments like Virtuozzo, OpenVZ, VMware, XEN, KVM and Virtualbox.

Key Features

• Can be easily integrated with popular web hosting control panels like cPanel, DirectAdmin, and Webmin.
• Notifies excessive resource user and suspicious process via email alerts.
• Intrusion detection system.
• Checks for exploits.

8.VyOS

VyOS is a community fork of Vyatta, a distribution discontinued in 2013. It is a network operating system that provides software-based network routing, firewall and VPN functionality. VyOS is based on Debian GNU/Linux and is completely free and open-source. Its features include the ability to run on both physical and virtual platforms, and support for paravirtual drivers and integration packages for virtual platforms.

Key Features

• Task scheduler
• SNMP
• Configuration versioning and remote archiving
• Event handling
• Remote Syslog
• Web proxy with some URL filtering support (no HTTPS filtering) and more.