Distributed firewalls provide data security in LANs by enforcing security policies at network endpoints rather than a single centralized firewall. This overcomes issues with traditional firewalls like single points of failure, restricted topologies, and an assumption that inside users are trusted. A distributed firewall uses a central management system to define security policies which are then enforced by policy agents on endpoints using public key certificates for authentication. This allows filtering of both internal and external traffic according to the security policy.