How many rules are required for a Check Point Firewall connection from IP address 192.168.20.13 to www.Check Point.com?

The correct answer is based on the stateful inspection capabilities of Check Point firewalls. Stateful Inspection technology goes beyond mere packet filtering by maintaining the state of active connections. This allows the firewall to track the state of network connections—such as TCP streams— and allows only the appropriate reply traffic for an established session to pass through.

When a client, such as the machine with IP address 192.168.20.13, initiates a connection to an external web server like www.Check Point.com, it sends an outgoing HTTP request (typically on port 80 for HTTP or port 443 for HTTPS). The Check Point firewall will allow this outbound request based on a single rule configured for HTTP or HTTPS traffic.

Upon receiving the request, the web server will respond back to the originating client with the relevant data. Because the Check Point firewall keeps track of the state of the connection it established during the outbound request, it will automatically allow the incoming response traffic back to 192.168.20.13—again without needing an additional rule specifically for this incoming traffic. Thus, only one rule is required to handle both the outgoing request and the incoming response.

In summary, the correctness of this answer is tied to the intelligent operation of stateful inspection