Stateful inspection

nounverified·updated May 9, 2026

GlossaryL1 — what DictionaryL2 — how used ThesaurusL3 — relations Universaleverything

A firewall inspection technique that examines the claimed purpose of a communication for validity. For example, a communication claiming to respond to a request is compared to a table of outstanding requests.

MWEFederal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) IT Examination Handbook Infobase, Glossary

Senses

2 more senses beyond the canonical

SANS Glossary of Security Terms

Also referred to as dynamic packet filtering. Stateful inspection is a firewall architecture that works at the network layer. Unlike static packet filtering, which examines a packet based on the information in its header, stateful inspection examines not just the header information but also the contents of the packet up through the application layer in order to determine more about the packet than just information about its source and destination.

ISACA Cybersecurity Glossary

A firewall architecture that tracks each connection traversing all interfaces of the firewall and makes sure they are valid.

Classifications

per-axis with provenance

Entity Type

Control92%llm-generatedllm:claude-haiku-4-5

?unassignedlast reviewed —

Sensitivity

unclassified

Information Class

unclassified

Variants

3 surface forms

plural: Stateful inspections
possessive: Stateful inspection's
pluralpossessive: Stateful inspections'

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