Varun Salian, Applications Developer at Oracle (2021-present) ‘Answered 2 years ago What is a Layer 7 firewall? If you are familiar with the OSI reference model (or even TCP/IP protocol) the answer to your question would be obvious. Host 8 ‘Application Layer ] |. Presentation Layer | ‘Session Layer ‘Transport layer sport ley. Transport Layer Network layer I” “protest >) Datastink ayer - "pratacare lal As it can be seen from the image, the seventh layer of the OSI reference model is the Application layer, this layer is responsible for encapsulating and decapsulating the data with a certain port number linked to that application (example: http, smtp, ftp etc). So, basically it looks over the application services and the data that the system receives(or sends). Most of the firewalls basically are Layer 3 firewalls, which means that any packets coming from a certain IP address can be blacklisted and vice versa Layer 7 firewalls involve in the blocking of traffic on a certain port, maybe with some conditions, Let's say the traffic that is coming into the layer 7 is trying to use some vulnerability of an application (where application is represented by a port number) now this traffic can be blocked while allowing any other traffic on the same port