History of Firewalls

Firewall technology first began to emerge in the late 1980s when the Internet was still a fairly new technology in terms of its global usage and connectivity. The original idea was formed in response to a number of major internet security breaches, which occurred in the late 1980s. In 1988 an employee at the NASA Ames Research Center in California sent a memo by email to his colleagues that read, "We are currently under attack from an Internet VIRUS! It has hit Berkeley, UC San Diego, Lawrence Livermore, Stanford, and NASA Ames." This virus known as the Morris Worm was carried by e-mail and is now a common nuisance for even the most innocuous domestic user. The Morris Worm was the first large scale attack on Internet security, which the online community neither expected, nor were prepared for. The internet community made it a top priority to combat any future attacks from happening and began to collaborate on new ideas, systems and software to make the internet safe again.

The first paper published on firewall technology was in 1988, when Jeff Mogul from Digital Equipment Corp. developed filter systems known as packet filter firewalls. This fairly basic system was the first generation of what would become a highly evolved and technical internet security feature. From 1980-1990 two colleagues from AT&T Bell Laboratories, Dave Presetto and Howard Trickey, developed the second generation of firewalls known as circuit level firewalls. Publications by Gene Spafford of Purdue University, Bill Cheswick at AT&T laboratories and Marcus Ranum described a third generation firewall known as application layer firewall, also known as proxy-based firewalls. Marcus Ranum's work on the technology spearheaded the creation of the first commercial product. The product was released by Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC) who named it the SEAL product. DEC.s first major sale was on June 13, 1991 to a chemical company based on the East-Coast of the USA.