Cisco ASA, PIX, and FWSM Firewall Handbook, Second Edition, is a guide for the most commonly implemented features of the popular Cisco® firewall security solutions. Fully updated to cover the latest firewall releases, this book helps you to quickly and easily configure, integrate, and manage the entire suite of Cisco firewall products, including ASA, PIX®, and the Catalyst® Firewall Services Module (FWSM).

Organized by families of features, this book helps you get up to speed quickly and efficiently on topics such as file management, building connectivity, controlling access, firewall management, increasing availability with failover, load balancing, logging, and verifying operation.

Sections are marked by shaded tabs for quick reference, and information on each feature is presented in a concise format, with background, configuration, and example components.

Whether you are looking for an introduction to the latest ASA, PIX, and FWSM devices or a complete reference for making the most out of your Cisco firewall deployments, Cisco ASA, PIX, and FWSM Firewall Handbook, Second Edition, helps you achieve maximum protection of your network resources.

“Many books on network security and firewalls settle for a discussion focused primarily on concepts and theory. This book, however, goes well beyond these topics. It covers in tremendous detail the information every network and security administrator needs to know when configuring and managing market-leading firewall products from Cisco.”

—Jason Nolet, Vice President of Engineering, Security Technology Group, Cisco

David Hucaby, CCIE® No. 4594, is a lead network engineer for the University of Kentucky, where he works with health-care networks based on the Cisco Catalyst, ASA, FWSM, and VPN product lines. He was one of the beta reviewers of the ASA 8.0 operating system software.

• Learn about the various firewall models, user interfaces, feature sets, and configuration methods


• Understand how a Cisco firewall inspects traffic


• Configure firewall interfaces, routing, IP addressing services, and IP multicast support


• Maintain security contexts and flash and configuration files, manage users, and monitor firewalls with SNMP


• Authenticate, authorize, and maintain accounting records for firewall users


• Control access through the firewall by implementing transparent and routed firewall modes, address translation, and traffic shunning


• Define security policies that identify and act on various types of traffic with the Modular Policy Framework


• Increase firewall availability with firewall failover operation


• Understand how firewall load balancing works


• Generate firewall activity logs and learn how to analyze the contents of the log


• Verify firewall operation and connectivity and observe data passing through a firewall


• Configure Security Services Modules, such as the Content Security Control (CSC) module and the Advanced Inspection Processor (AIP) module

This security book is part of the Cisco Press® Networking Technology Series. Security titles from Cisco Press help networking professionals secure critical data and resources, prevent and mitigate network attacks, and build end-to-end self-defending networks.

Category: Networking: Security

Covers: Cisco ASA 8.0, PIX 6.3, and FWSM 3.2 version firewalls