Abstract: With the advancement in networking services, network security has become the key facet in our digital world. The term network security constitutes prevention of network and network resources by ceaseless monitoring and thereby denying the services like user access to network resources and modification of network configuration details from unauthorized users. Firewalls are one such network security system that monitors the inbound and outbound traffic of the network, this observation relies on two principal factors, Stateless and Stateful firewalls. The Stateless firewalls track the source and destination address of every incoming and outgoing data packets whereas the Stateful firewalls track each packet in the network by reading the entire header and thus it can read the type of data being transmitted. “PLUTO – A home office firewall” is a stateless firewall which can be used in Linux environment. The main motto behind developing the PLUTO as real time firewall is to demonstrate a real-time application for home office users through which they can secure their network.

Keywords: Pluto, home office firewall, firewalls, network perimeter security.