Juniper SRX Series

Foreword

Christofer Hoff

My career in networking and system administration took me from a hobbyist and self-proclaimed accidental tourist in the field of security to someone with a focused, passionate, and all-consuming obsession. It all started with a little thing called the firewall.

Back in the late 1980s and into the early 1990s, the commercial Internet boom began and organizations rushed to connect their computing resources directly to the burgeoning collective that would ultimately become known as the World Wide Web.

As the computing assets under my watch became more exposed and interconnected—and thus potentially ubiquitously accessed—I found myself spending a lot of quality time evaluating the various emerging network firewalls of the period as a way of reducing the scope of the things I had to protect.

These firewalls came in all shapes, sizes, speeds, and architectural designs. They evolved from primitive stateless access control lists in Internet-connected routers to full-fledged proxies, circuit-level gateways, and stateful packet filters that provided more robust protocol and services support, logging, and Network Address Translation capabilities.

Each firewall platform promised a dizzying array of benefits, but given the myriad of designs, each one often forced a trade-off among isolation, usability, manageability, scalability, performance, features, and efficacy.

After a startup or two and deploying many of these firewalls, I found myself in the employ of a large networking ...