Mcafee, Inc.

Michael J Karels

David Frederick Diehl

Michael W Green

Michael James Silbersack

A proxy device such as a firewall uses an internal socket namespace such as a text string such that connection requests must be explicitly redirected to a listening socket in the alternate namespace in order to connect to a service. Because external connections cannot directly address the listening socket or service, greater security is provided than with traditional firewall or proxy devices. To receive a redirected proxy connection, a service process creates a listening socket and binds a name in an alternate namespace to the socket before listening for connections.

Named sockets in a firewall

A firewall cluster having three or more firewall processing nodes sharing the same shared IP address. Port numbers are assigned to the firewall processing nodes within the cluster and are used to distinguish between traffic sent to the cluster. Each network connection is assigned a destination port number. Each node receives the network connection and its assigned port number and determines if the assigned destination port number matches one of its assigned port numbers. If so, the node processes the network connection. If the assigned destination port number does not match one of its assigned port numbers, the network connection is discarded.

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Eden Prairie, MN, United States of America

Michael J Karels