How to Turn Off Stateful Firewall

One of the core principles behind a stateful firewall is to allow known good traffic and block any bad traffic. This means that, by default, all incoming connections are examined to determine if they should be allowed or blocked. If you encounter problems accessing external resources through your system’s Firewall software, it could be because either port forwarding has not been configured correctly or the firewall is not allowing some traffic.

How to Disable Stateful Firewall in Windows 10

In this tutorial, we will be using Windows Firewall with Advanced Security as an example. However, if your operating system uses a different control panel for its firewall software, you can follow similar steps in order to reach where you need to go.

Select “Advanced Settings” from the left pane of your Control Panel. Once in the advanced settings, click on “Inbound Rules“. If you have never made any changes to it before, there will only be a single rule visible- all others will either be hidden or disabled. Click on that rule and then press Ctrl+X at the same time. This will open a dialog box asking you to confirm that you want to delete the selected item(s). Press “Yes” in order to proceed, and then close your Control Panel when done.

Now reopen it up again by pressing Windows Key+S on your keyboard, typing “Control panel,” and then clicking on its icon. In the Control Panel window, click on “Turn Windows features on or off.” This will open another dialog box which lists all of your currently installed windows components and services. Scroll down to where it says “Windows Firewall” and deselect the option named “Stateful Packet Inspection.” Once you have finished this step press OK, reboot your computer, and then check to see if your firewall issues have been resolved.

Disable Stateful Firewall via CMD

Open a command prompt as administrator. Type the following commands, pressing Enter after each one: “netsh advfirewall set global stateful disable”. Reboot your computer and check to see if this resolved your firewall issues.

Disable Stateful Firewall via Registry Editor

You can also use the registry editor for enabling or disabling firewalls.

Open up regedit by pressing Windows Key+R on your keyboard, typing “regedit” in the search box that appears and clicking OK. This will open a window with its main pane listing all of the registry keys currently available for you to navigate through inside it.

Click on CHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SharedAccess and then open up the “Start” key. If it has a value of either “0” or “Disable“, this means that your firewall is currently set to be disabled.

In order to enable it, change its value from 0 to any number higher than this (e.g., “15”). If there is no “Start” key, you can create one by right-clicking on the SharedAccess folder and pressing New->Key. A new window will appear with an automatically generated name for your newly created registry entry so just type Start in order to rename it, press Enter, double click on its default value (i.e., “Automatic”), and then change it to either “0″ or any number higher than this.

Disable Stateful Firewall via Services Manager

You can also use a services manager for enabling or disabling firewalls. Open up Services Manager by typing services.msc on the search box, select windows firewall service and press enter. Right click on it and select properties from the menu, goto “startup type” tab and change the state of startup type as disabled or manual.

How to enable or disable stateful FTP on a firewall?

To disable stateful firewalls for FTP traffic, you need to do the following:

If you’re currently using the Control Panel, click on “Advanced Settings” from the left pane. Once in the advanced settings menu ,click on “Inbound Rules.” The list of rules that appear will vary depending upon whether or not you’ve made any changes before and what they are- if anything appears here at all.

If you see any inbound rules displayed, select them all by clicking on the first one and holding down Shift while you click on the last one. Once they’re all selected, right-click anywhere inside of this list and then press “Disable” from the resulting menu that appears. Now, turn your attention to the top pane which lists all of the rules that Windows Firewall has for inbound traffic. Scroll down until you see a rule labeled as “File and Printer Sharing (Echo Request – ICMPv4)” or something very similar to it, select it by clicking on it once, press Ctrl+X on your keyboard and then click Yes when prompted to confirm your action.

Go back to the “Inbound Rules” list and select the rule that you just previously modified by pressing Ctrl+A on your keyboard, right-clicking anywhere within this window afterward and choosing “Properties.” Once in here, click once on either of these options: (Default) or Local IP address. If you select the first option, you’ll be changing this rule to apply on all network connections. If you choose Local IP address however, you will only change it for your current connection- whatever one is currently selected in Windows Firewall itself.

Choose “Allow the connection” if you want to allow FTP traffic through stateful firewalls or else choose “Block the connection” if you want to block FTP traffic. Click Apply and then click OK in order to confirm your changes and exit this window altogether.

Conclusion

Stateful firewalls keep track of your network traffic and decide whether or not to let each packet through depending upon what you click above. If you turn off stateful firewalls, all packets are allowed by default which increases the risk for potential intrusions into your system.