How does a firewall determine stateful session timeouts for long-lived connections?

Example Concept: Stateful firewalls, such as those configured in Cisco ASA or Palo Alto Networks devices, maintain a state table that tracks active connections. Each entry in the state table includes information about the source and destination IP addresses, ports, and protocol type. The firewall uses protocol-specific timeout values to determine when to remove an entry from the state table. For example, TCP connections may have longer timeouts due to their connection-oriented nature, whereas UDP connections, being connectionless, may have shorter timeouts. Administrators can adjust these timeout values to suit specific network requirements, ensuring that legitimate long-lived connections remain open while stale sessions are closed.