Personal Firewall

• A personal firewall is used to protect a single host or a small network such as a home network. Home users need to use firewall to protect their system from outside network.
• Using a separate firewall system would be expensive. To tackle this problem personal firewall are used.
• A personal firewall is an application program that runs on a work station to block unwanted traffic from network. It can complement the work of conventional firewall by screening the kind of data a single host will accept. It may be used to enforce certain policies.
• Any of the packet filter, stateful filter or application proxy can be used which are simpler for the sake of efficiency.
• Example: Users may decide that certain sites such as computers on company network are highly trustworthy but most other sites are not.
• It is general practice to combine virus scanner with a personal firewall. A user may forget to run virus scanner daily. The combination of virus scanner and personal firewall is both effective and efficient.