Comment Re:STATEFUL firewalls (Score 1) 217
Even if one could magically configure a stateful firewall to be invulnerable to state table exhaustion attacks, it still serves no purpose. When you're fronting a server farm, the point is to allow access to the site on the correct ports. Stateless ACLs in hardware do that, and function at millions of packets per second. Stateful firewalls start dying at a fraction of theoretical throughput when faced with an attack that specifically targets the state table. There are no network state attacks against web services that aren't better handled on the servers. The place for stateful firewalls is in front of clients, where you want to disallow packets that aren't part of a conversation started from the inside.