A system that has been hardened to resist attack at some critical point of entry, and which is installed on a network in such a way that it is expected to come under attack. Bastion hosts are often components of firewalls, or may be 'outside" Web servers or public access systems. Generally, a bastion host is running some form of general purpose operating system (e.g., LNIX, VMS, WNT, etc.) rather than a ROM-based or firmware operating system.