The heart of any firewall access control mechanism is, of course, the technology by which it permits or denies packets destined for protected networks. WinRoute implements one of the most commonly used technologies for network access control: packet filtering. Although WinRoute does implement other access control mechanisms, such as an integrated caching proxy server for HTTP, FTP, and Gopher protocols, this is primarily intended as an outbound performance enhancing element and not a security feature.
Packet filtering has a long tradition in the security community, and is still implemented widely in products such as Cisco’s IOS network device operating system. Configured properly, packet filters can be made quite secure, and are particularly appropriate for high-volume Internet sites as they provide the best performance benefits.