What type of firewall tracks the state of all connections and requests in a network?

A stateful firewall is designed to monitor and track the state of active connections, making it particularly effective at maintaining the context of communications across a network. Unlike simpler firewalls, such as packet-filtering firewalls, which operate purely on predetermined security rules without considering the state of the connection, a stateful firewall maintains a state table that records the details of each connection.

This means that the stateful firewall can discern between legitimate packets that are part of established connections and unauthorized packets that may attempt to exploit the network. By doing so, it provides a deeper level of security because it can make more informed decisions based on the state of the connection rather than only evaluating packets on an individual basis.

Application firewalls focus on filtering traffic for a specific application, while network firewalls serve as a broader security layer for a network boundary but don’t specifically track the state of connections. Packet-filtering firewalls only analyze packet header information and do not take the context of the connections into account. Therefore, the capability of a stateful firewall to track and manage the state of connections makes it the correct choice for the question regarding which type of firewall performs this function.