Windows Firewall Basics

Microsoft continues to follow through on its promise to lock down its Windows OSs. Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) includes a robust evolution of the Internet Connection Firewall (ICF), called Windows Firewall, which makes great strides toward helping secure your corporate workstations. Windows Firewall provides a stateful host-based firewall that you can centrally configure through Active Directory (AD) Group Policy. With ICF, Microsoft extended Windows 2000 IP filtering features into a stateful-inspection firewall. However, ICF suffers from a few shortcomings that have prevented its widespread adoption; for example, ICF is disabled out of the box and you can't centrally manage its settings. With its enhanced logging, centralized management, and more granular rules, Windows Firewall might be just what you're looking for to augment your existing network-layer firewalls. Best of all, Windows Firewall is available free of charge and is automatically enabled when you install XP SP2. In this article, I examine some of the features and configuration options available in Windows Firewall. (Note: At the time of this writing, Microsoft hasn't yet released the final XP SP2 version. This review is based on the prerelease version, Release Candidate 2--RC2--which Microsoft released in June 2004.) . . .