Continuing the discussion from Time for the ultimate test?:
Why does CORE have a firewall? First reason is because software has flaws and exposing those flaws to as few risk-factors as possible is an important part of making something more secure.
Another part in this is the fact that if someone does a portforward to CORE without reading the documentation about how to do it securely, the firewall will block it. By default most ports on CORE won’t respond to packets originating from outside your LAN.
The firewall also has some other uses, like the upcoming feature of, optionally, denying all outgoing Internet traffic from all or select containers/services/integrations.
Can you disable the firewall? Yes, absolutely. Should you? Not unless you’re certain you really need to and your network is secure (or you don’t care about security). It’s your choice, just like most anything else on CORE.