Example Concept: A stateful firewall inspects traffic flows and maintains a state table that tracks the state of active connections (e.g., TCP handshakes, UDP streams). It can make decisions based on the context of the traffic, such as allowing return traffic for an established connection. In contrast, a stateless firewall evaluates each packet in isolation, using predefined rules to allow or block traffic based solely on static criteria like source/destination IP addresses and ports, without considering the packet's relation to any ongoing session.