Personal Stateful Firewall Overview 
Cisco ASR 5000 Series Product Overview ▄  
  UDP-based Attacks: 
  Invalid UDP echo response 
  Invalid UDP packet length 
  UDP checksum errors 
  Short UDP header length 
  UDP flood attack — Detected only in downlink direction 
  ICMP-based Attacks: 
  Invalid ICMP response 
  ICMP reply error 
  Invalid ICMP type packet 
  ICMP error message replay attacks 
  ICMP packets with duplicate sequence number 
  Short ICMP header length 
  Invalid ICMP packet length 
  ICMP flood attack — Detected only in downlink direction 
  Ping of death attacks 
  ICMP checksum errors 
  ICMP packets with destination unreachable message 
  Other DoS Attacks: 
  Port-scan attacks — Detected only in downlink direction 
 
Protection against Port Scanning 
Port scanning is a technique used to determine the states of TCP/UDP ports on a network host, and to map out hosts on 
a network. Essentially, a port scan consists of sending a message to each port on the host, one at a time. The kind of 
response received indicates whether the port is used, and can therefore be probed further for weakness. This way 
hackers find potential weaknesses that can be exploited. 
 
Stateful Firewall provides protection against port scanning by implementing port scan detection algorithms. Port-scan 
attacks are only detected in the downlink direction—traffic from external network towards mobile subscribers. 
 
Application-level Gateway Support 
A stateful firewall while ensuring that only legitimate connections are allowed, also maintains the state of an allowed 
connection. Some network applications require additional connections to be opened up in either direction and 
information regarding such connections is sent in the application payload. For these applications to work properly, a 
stateful firewall must inspect, analyze, and parse these application payloads to get the additional connection 
information, and open partial connections/pinholes in the firewall to allow the connections.