Firewall

Also found in: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Medical, Legal, Acronyms, Encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

Firewall

The legal barrier between banking and broker/dealer operations within a financial institution created to prevent the exchange of inside information.

Chinese Wall

Informal; the imposed lack of communication between the investment banking and brokerage services of a financial institution. The Chinese wall exists in order to prevent brokers and investment bankers working for the same company from deliberately or accidentally sharing inside information that could lead to illegal insider trading. The Chinese wall protects both the financial institution at large and the individual investment bankers and brokers.

References in periodicals archive ?

As strong as a hardware firewall is for inbound traffic, you'll still need a software firewall to catch outbound mischief like spyware and viruses that use your system to send mail without your consent.

Don't get burned online: hardware or software, a firewall is your first line of defense

However, the other alternative of placing the VPN gateway inside the firewall presents a different problem.

Making Sense Of VPN Systems, Standards, And Protocols

As the name suggests, the purpose of firewalls is to insulate a bank and its customers from the potential hazards of combining commercial and investment banking.

Statement by Susan M. Phillips, Member, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, before the Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Regulatory Relief of the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, March 20, 1997

The addition of the high-speed firewall service to the Digex managed security suite addresses the rapidly expanding security needs of enterprise clients as the market for firewall technology in the US alone is forecasted to increase by 27% over the next four years ("Global network security markets to 2005" Datamonitor, December 2000).