Net Firewall - The History Of Computer Filtering Protection

A net firewall, short for Network Layer Firewall

, is a specific type that inspects packets, bits of data sent over a computer network, before allowing them to pass through to their destination. The technology behind this kind of protection filtering began back in the late 1980's. The Internet was around, but was still in its infancy, only being by government departments, and in the world of academia. It hadn't yet reached the widespread commercial use that it sees today. In 1988, there was a significant security breach and a NASA scientist sent out a memo to his co-workers saying that they were under attack by a virus.

The virus, later known as the Morris Worm, hit not only NASA, but also Berkeley, UC San Diego, Stanford, and Lawrence Livermore. The worm was spread by email, as many viruses and other internet pests commonly still are today. The Morris Worm was the first attack of its kind. It being such a large scale attack, the focus was on the security of the internet at the time, and the small Internet community was not expecting it, nor was it prepared to deal with it. The online community was determined to prevent any future attacks from occurring again, and thus they began brainstorming new ideas that would eventually lead them to create a net firewall, that would once again make the internet safe.

In 1988, a man named Jeff Mogul, an employee at Digital Equipment Corp. published the first paper on the technology used by net firewalls, which is a filter system that is used to inspect packets before allowing them to pass through to their destination. This first version was just the basic system and would go on to be a much more complex Internet security feature. A second generation system was created by two AT&T Bell Laboratories employees, Dave Presetto and Howard Trickey, who worked on the more advanced system from 1980 to 1990. The second generation of protection filtering systems became known as circuit level firewalls. Later, a third generation of protection was created, which was known as the Application Layer Firewall, commonly called Proxy Based Firewalls.

The work done on these types of filtering systems led to the first commercial internet security product being released by Digital Equipment Corporation. Their first major sale was to a chemical company located on the east coast in the United States. Research continued on packet inspection and the net firewall advanced. Eventually a visual interface was created that had colors and graphics which could easily be used on the newly released Windows operating system, back in the 1992.

by: Troy Truman

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