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Brief History of Check Point Firewalls

At the beginning of things

The idea of filtering traffic between different networks is as old as routing itself.  Most routers are capable of enforcing so-called “access lists” to define basic inter-network communication restrictions.

The first paper describing network packet filtering was published by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1988.  In 1992 DEC presented the very first commercial firewall: DEC SEAL.  Early firewalls such as SEAL checked network addresses and sometimes the port numbers of a packet to determine whether that packet could be forwarded or should be discarded.  This type of inspection is called Static Packet Filtering (SPF).

 

_Val__0-1591773612061.png

 

Figure 1: Static Filtering Enforcement - OSI Model

 

As shown on the diagram above, SPF acts on Layers 3 and 4 of OSI Networking Model.  Its security decision is based on IP addresses and in some cases ports of IP packets.

 

Although packet filtering’s logic is very simple, is has a fundamental

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27 Comments
SabujKumarRoy
Explorer

A very good article to know about the history of Checkpoint! Thank you.

_Val_
Admin
Admin

thanks @SabujKumarRoy 

Jerry
Mentor
Mentor

excellent documentary, brings memories indeed ... 🙂 

Vincent_Bacher
Advisor
Advisor

yes, memories...... 3.0 on HP-UX......long ago.....

amitjpatil08
Explorer

Very Informative...Thank you!!!

EdenC
Explorer

A wonderful story for someone new to the technology like me to read. Great article!

louzhu
Participant

It's wonderful for history lover.

adilson-antonio
Explorer

It is very nice to know the full CheckPoint history since the beginning.

Murat_TURAN
Participant

I have been working on Check Point since 2000. This article made me remember my progress in the world of Check Point once again.

_Val_
Admin
Admin

@Murat_TURAN thanks for your feedback, more or less the same for me personally, 1999 🙂

Murat_TURAN
Participant

@_Val_  The first version I installed must be R51. 

_Val_
Admin
Admin

4.0 here

Murat_TURAN
Participant

@_Val_  Do you have a detailed timeline? Only version and year. 

_Val_
Admin
Admin

@Murat_TURAN this will require some work. I was checking the dates with archive.org when writing the article above, but I do not have a timeline handy. 

Pretty sure you there is a way to build one though...

PhoneBoy
Admin
Admin

My first version I installed was 2.0…back in 1996.
I remember the days of fwui on Solaris and fwxlconf to configure NAT. 🙂

Jerry
Mentor
Mentor

I've started from 4.0 ... then SPLAT and IPSO slowly but surely took the market by storm 😛 

the_rock
Legend
Legend

Well, all I remember WELL was CP management running super stable on Solaris and ipso called Ipsilon...right @PhoneBoy ? : - )

Murat_TURAN
Participant

Conversation turns a challenge. 😊😊 

_Val_
Admin
Admin

Solaris - shmolaris. Did you ever install FW-1 on AIX, good ppl?

 

PhoneBoy
Admin
Admin

Believe I did it on AIX and HP/UX. And Windows. 

ganeshchavan6
Explorer

A very good article to know about the history of Checkpoint! 

curmudge1
Explorer

I recall our Sun V240 firewall running Checkpoint had 3 years uptime.    Must have been an uneventful period where we didn't upgrade the firewall.

And I recall when Checkpoint announced the new version that would only run on Intel platforms.  Dropping support for Sparc wasn't in the announcement, but at the Checkpoint event I asked "Hey, what about Solaris Sparc?" and was informed that that was no more.   I understand the business decision, but the way the announcement did not mention that other platforms were discontinued seemed disrespectful to us customers that relied on those platforms.   Was kind of sneaky, "let's not bring that up and hope no one notices and makes a fuss, the customers will figure it out eventually" appoach.    The event was in NYC somewhere. 

Still a Checkpoint customer, going on 20 years or so.   And in previous employments used or resold Checkpoint when working for a Sun reseller.   I think Sun used to bundle a Checkpoint license with new systems at one time.  Ahh, the old days.  

 

_Val_
Admin
Admin

@curmudge1 I wish I could say "I feel your pain". From my own experience, I do recall support for Solaris being properly documented in the release notes and also announced to the field. In fact,

I was working with my customers who needed migration to other platforms. Could it be that you just missed that info and got frustrated?

Christian_Koehl
Collaborator
Collaborator

I believe there is a "big error" in the beginning 😄. The product name of the firewall in the early days, was "FireWall-1" (and not "Firewall-1").


Started with 4.0 - looooooooooooooooong time ago.

Firewall on SunSolaris, no interface were working. It took me a long time to found the reason, an empty line at the end of the config file. You don't see this normally in VI....

_Val_
Admin
Admin

@Christian_Koehl Thanks, that was easy to fix. Funny enough, this article is quite old, and not just the author, but three reviewers missed that simple typo.

the_rock
Legend
Legend

@curmudge1 ...I remember number 71 stuck in my head, as thats number of customers I talked to, who had CP mgmt server running on Solaris back in the days. Common thing with all of them...never a single problem 🙂

Andy

ramprasad99
Participant

good