About Transparent Firewall Mode

Traditionally, a firewall is a routed hop and acts as a default gateway for hosts that connect to one of its screened subnets. A transparent firewall, on the other hand, is a Layer 2 firewall that acts like a “bump in the wire,” or a “stealth firewall,” and is not seen as a router hop to connected devices. However, like any other firewall, access control between interfaces is controlled, and all of the usual firewall checks are in place.

Layer 2 connectivity is achieved by using a "bridge group" where you group together the inside and outside interfaces for a network, and the threat defense device uses bridging techniques to pass traffic between the interfaces. Each bridge group includes a Bridge Virtual Interface (BVI) to which you assign an IP address on the network. You can have multiple bridge groups for multiple networks. In transparent mode, these bridge groups cannot communicate with each other.