The firewall supports Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) (RFC 5880), a protocol that recognizes a failure in the bidirectional path between two routing peers. BFD failure detection is extremely fast, providing for a faster failover than can be achieved by link monitoring or frequent dynamic routing health checks, such as Hello packets or heartbeats. Mission-critical data centers and networks that require high availability and extremely fast failover need the extremely fast failure detection that BFD provides.