An application firewall is primarily used as an enhancement to the standard firewall program by providing firewall services up to the application layer. Some of the services performed by an application firewall include controlling the execution of applications, data handling, blocking malicious code from being executed and more. There are two types of application firewalls:

• Network-Based Application Firewalls: Scan and monitor network-based traffic destined for the application layer or for any specific application.
• Host-Based Application Firewalls: Monitor all the incoming and outgoing traffic initiated by an application or service on a local computer, system or host.