What does a stateless firewall do?

• A. It inspects and tracks all connections
• B. It does not maintain the state of active connections
• C. It automatically updates rules from a central server
• D. It performs deep packet inspection of all application payloads

Answer: (B)

Stateless firewalls evaluate each packet on its own, without remembering previous packets or the state of any connection. Because they don’t track ongoing sessions, they don’t maintain the state of active connections. That makes the statement about not maintaining connection state the best description.

The idea of inspecting and tracking all connections describes a stateful firewall that keeps track of session state. Automatically updating rules from a central server is about policy management, not the inherent handling of packet state. Deep packet inspection of all application payloads focuses on examining data at the application layer, which is a separate capability from whether the firewall is stateless.