New Blog | Validating FTP traffic scenarios with Azure Firewall

Written by Gopikrishna Kannan (Head of Products: Azure Firewall and Firewall Manager)

 

The Azure Firewall is a cloud-native and intelligent network firewall security service that can be integrated into many different use cases. It’s a fully stateful firewall as a service with built-in high availability and unrestricted cloud scalability that provides both east-west and north-south traffic inspection.

This blog will discuss FTP scenario with Azure Firewall. FTP or File Transfer Protocol is the most common use case for enterprise customers. FTP may be configured to run in active or passive mode, which determines how the data connection is established.

Azure Firewall supports both Active and Passive FTP scenarios.  Passive FTP mode requires FTP client to initiate connection to the server on a specified port range. Passive FTP is the recommended approach for East - West (E-W) scenarios. In Active FTP mode, the server initiates connection to the client. This approach is typically deployed to support internet clients connecting to the FTP server running behind Azure Firewall and requires more than 250 DNAT ports (Azure Firewall DNAT rule limits) to be opened hitting load balancer limits. By default, Passive FTP is enabled, and Active FTP support is disabled to protect against FTP bounce attacks using the FTP PORT command.

Read the blog: Validating FTP traffic scenarios with Azure Firewall - Microsoft Community Hub