Top 15 Advanced Policy Firewall Alternative and Similar Softwares | Mar 2024

Advanced Policy Firewall (APF) is an iptables(netfilter) based firewall system designed around the essential needs of today’s Linux servers. The configuration is designed to be very informative and easy to follow. The management on a day-to-day basis is conducted from the command line with the ‘apf’ command, which includes detailed usage information on all the features.
The technical side of APF is such that it utilizes the latest stable features from the iptables (netfilter) project to provide a very robust and powerful firewall. The filtering performed by APF is three fold:
1) Static rule based policies (not to be confused with a “static firewall”)
2) Connection based stateful policies
3) Sanity based policies
The first, static rule based policies, is the most traditional method of firewalling. This is when the firewall has an unchanging set of instructions (rules) on how traffic should be handled in certain conditions. An example of a static rule based policy would be when you allow/deny an address access to the server with the trust system or open a new port with conf.apf. So the short of it is rules that infrequently or never change while the firewall is running.
The second, connection based stateful policies, is a means to distinguish legitimate packets for different types of connections. Only packets matching a known connection will be allowed by the firewall; others will be rejected. An example of this would be FTP data transfers, in an older era of firewalling you would have to define a complex set of static policies to allow FTA data transfers to flow without a problem. That is not so with stateful policies, the firewall can see that an address has established a connection to port 21 then “relate” that address to the data transfer portion of the connection and dynamically alter the firewall to allow the traffic.
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1. HeatShield

HeatShield HeatShield is a network firewall management service for Linux servers. A firewall configured by HeatShield prevents unauthorized access to services running on your servers, such as SSH and MySQL. Using HeatShield, you can easily restrict access to these services so that only IP addresses you trust are allowed to communicate......

2. netfilter

netfilter Netfilter software comprises iptables, ipset, conntrack-tools, libnetfilter and more. It is the core of Linux firewalls and NAT. It consists of a set of hooks inside the Linux kernel and a number of utilities to manage callback functions.......

3. Shorewall

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4. IPQ BDB

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5. iptablesbuild

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6. ConfigServer Firewall

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7. Comodo Firewall

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8. Kaspersky Internet Security

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9. VodooShield

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10. WIPFW

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11. Windows Firewall Control

Windows Firewall Control Windows Firewall Control is a nifty little application which extends the functionality of the Windows Firewall and provides quick access to the most frequent options of Windows Firewall. It runs in the system tray and shows notifications on outgoing blocked connections. This is the best tool to manage the native......

12. Bot Revolt

Bot Revolt Bot Revolt, security you can see. Cyber security that works!Key features of Bot Revolt are: * Malware connection blocking – blocks and prevents malicious connections * Real time protection – monitors internet connections all the time * Prevents access to malware, spyware, scam and spam attack sites * Notifications –......

13. ferm

ferm ferm is a tool to maintain complex firewalls, without having the trouble to rewrite the complex rules over and over again. ferm allows the entire firewall rule set to be stored in a separate file, and to be loaded with one command. The firewall configuration resembles structured programming-like language, which......

14. COMODO Internet Security

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15. Guarddog

Guarddog Guarddog is a firewall configuration utility for Linux systems. Guarddog is aimed at two groups of users. Novice to intermediate users who are not experts in TCP/IP networking and security, and those users who don't want the hastle of dealing with cryptic shell scripts and ipchains/iptables parameters.......