Computer Networks and distributed Systems

as part of the BMBF-Compound Project SIMBA — „Key Concepts of Informatics in multi medial Elements under special Consideration of Women's specific Learning Interests”

Advice for Teachers - Firewall

This component deals with the role of a firewall offering, on the one hand, a brief explanation, in which the central processes and functions of a firewall are described and, on the other hand, additionally providing an exercise mode, which gives learners the possibility to check upon their knowledge.
The illustration below shows a section of the visualization flow. It shows how the Firewall-Application, according to its pre-defined standards, checks and rejects a data package.

Rejection of a package according to the firewall's pre-defined standards

By means of the data packages' header information the firewall in this example filters type (e.g. TCP or UDP), IP-Addresses of the transmitter and the receiver as well as of the respective port numbers.

Within the exercise mode learners have the possibility to set their own body of standards for a firewall by means of given elements, afterwards having it run through by randomly generated data packages. This is meant especially for learners, who would like to repeat the information imparted in the visualization on their own using smaller steps.

Nowadays firewalls are used on most of the networked computer systems. However, many users rarely ever or do not at all think about the respective operating mode. Especially with this kind of learners the explanation by the means of visualizations and interactions is a sensible means complementing theoretical explanation.

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