Whether you know what firewalls are or not, this article will introduce this concept to you and show you how firewalls are working on mobile devices.
What are firewalls?
Firewalls are a common way to eliminate threats and unwanted things coming to you from the open world network. They basically act as a gatekeeper between you and the outside network. Firewalls are widely used by home, small / home office (SOHO) to large corporations to keep the bad packets out of the networks. Packets are generally the chunk of data transmitted over the network.
Firewalls on smartphones and tablets
Typically mobile devices do not use a firewall since they do not have a wide array of open ports like a traditional computer has. And since they are not listening, in practice, it is already a firewall. The network that the mobile devices use, both cellular and Wi-Fi has its own firewalls that protect the interconnected networked devices.
You may find some more traditional firewall software/ apps for your mobile device and install them, and use them, but this depends on if your operating system allows you to do so. Software firewall packages for Android include things like basic ruling out for the construction of rules, filtering traffic coming into the host, and so on. Almost all of the packages include solutions for intrusion detection and anti-malware.
What should you know about firewalls?
Part of these solutions may come in as standalone service and requires configuration, and management from the user. There are also enterprise-grade solutions that can be centrally configured and managed. Keep one thing in mind that software firewall packages generally work at a basic level and not to expect that they would keep every possible threat away. Still, they can work great as an extra layer of defence for the device along with the heavy shield that should be on the topmost layer of the shield.
These primary firewalls are supposed to be well architect, configured, and deployed. In addition to them, these mini firewall makes the device almost invincible. Notice I mentioned almost since you never know what kind of vulnerability one may find from the other side, but still, that would take a great deal to break that layer and get into the network.