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pfSense is a
firewall Firewall may refer to: * Firewall (computing), a technological barrier designed to prevent unauthorized or unwanted communications between computer networks or hosts * Firewall (construction), a barrier inside a building, designed to limit the spre ...
/ router computer software distribution based on
FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...
. The
open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
pfSense Community Edition (CE) and pfSense Plus is installed on a physical computer or a virtual machine to make a dedicated firewall/router for a network. It can be configured and upgraded through a web-based interface, and requires no knowledge of the underlying FreeBSD system to manage.


Overview

The pfSense project began in 2004 as a fork of the m0n0wall project by Chris Buechler and Scott Ullrich. Its first release was in October 2006. The name derives from the fact that the software uses the packet-filtering tool, PF. Notable functions of pfSense include traffic shaping, VPNs using IPsec or PPTP, captive portal, stateful firewall, network address translation, 802.1q support for VLANs, and dynamic DNS. pfSense can be installed on hardware with an
x86-64 x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit version of the x86 instruction set, first released in 1999. It introduced two new modes of operation, 64-bit mode and compatibility mode, along with a new 4-level paging mod ...
processor architecture. It can also be installed on embedded hardware using Compact Flash or SD cards, or as a virtual machine.


WireGuard protocol support

In February 2021, pfSense CE 2.5.0 and pfSense Plus 21.02 added support for a kernel WireGuard implementation. Support for WireGuard was temporarily removed in March 2021 after implementation issues were discovered by WireGuard founder Jason Donenfeld. The July 2021 release of pfSense CE 2.5.2 version re-included WireGuard.


See also

* Comparison of firewalls * List of router and firewall distributions


References


Further reading

* ''Mastering pfSense, Second Edition'' Birmingham, UK: Packt Publishing, 2018. . By David Zientra. * ''Security: Manage Network Security With pfSense Firewall ideo' Birmingham, UK: Packt, 2018. . By Manuj Aggarwal.


External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Pfsense 2004 software BSD software Firewall software Free routing software FreeBSD Gateway/routing/firewall distribution Operating system distributions bootable from read-only media Products introduced in 2004 Routers (computing) Wireless access points