Cisco Security Appliance
Five major characteristics of the Cisco Security Appliance family of firewalls design make it
a leading-edge, high-performance security solution:
■ Secure real-time embedded system—A single proprietary embedded system designed for
improved security, functionality, and performance.
■ Adaptive Security Algorithm—The key to stateful session control in all Cisco Security
Applicances. The ASA maintains state information in the state table and randomly
generates TCP sequence numbers to prevent session hijacking.
■ Cut-through proxy—A method for transparently performing authentication and
authorization of inbound and outbound connections at the firewall.
■ Security contexts—Provide a security professional with the ability to create multiple
firewall configurations using a single PIX or ASA Firewall.
■ Redundancy—The Cisco Secure PIX 515 series and above and all ASA Security
Appliances can be configured in pairs with a primary system and a hot standby.