Personal firewall

A personal firewall is an application which controls network traffic to and from a computer, permitting or denying communications based on a security policy. Typically it works as an application layer firewall.

A personal firewall differs from a conventional firewall in terms of scale. A personal firewall will usually protect only the computer on which it is installed, as compared to a conventional firewall which is normally installed on a designated interface between two or more networks, such as a router or proxy server. Hence, personal firewalls allow a security policy to be defined for individual computers, whereas a conventional firewall controls the policy between the networks that it connects.