Patent ID: 8677471

Claim:
A method of operating a firewall cluster, comprising: establishing a network connection to transfer data in a firewall cluster having three or more firewall processing nodes sharing a common Internet Protocol (IP) address: assigning the network connection to one of the three or more firewall processing nodes in the firewall cluster by sending the data to a destination port on the common IP address of the firewall cluster assigned to a receiving node of the three or more firewall processing nodes; receiving in the receiving node data from the assigned network connection and processing the received data from the assigned network connection based on matching the assigned network connection's destination port number to a port number assigned to the receiving node; and discarding data from the assigned network connection in the three or more firewall processing nodes other than the receiving node based on the assigned network connection's destination port number not matching a port number assigned to the three or more firewall processing nodes other than the receiving node.