BufferZone

Yeah..weird that. I see the same on Avira's forum and Defensewall's. Oh and Nortons and Mcafee as well. And now I think about it, Avast and AVG. It's a SUPPORT forum!!!!

 

Not a moan, just a statement of fact. If I can find a program that causes less problems I will drop Sandboxie, nothing more or less than that.

 

Thats a shame if true. The following is from an article from Oct 08, perhaps they changed the interface a bit.

Any chance the capability is there and you missed it?

 

Don't get me wrong,i mean to show your problem to the right person,in your case its TSUK.
He knows more about SB then all wilders members together.

 

Understood, I just am not terribly concerned about getting the SandBoxie problems sorted out if I can just as easily (or more easily) resolve them by switching to another program.

 

If you are after a pure sandboxing alternative then I don't believe there are any alternatives that are still actively developed. imho SBIE is by far the best and the most effective approach is for you to post your problems on the SBIE forum.

 

I just tested Buffer Zone and I must say its not bad at all. In fact, its pretty good IMO (at least so far).

Installation and set-up were quick and easy. There is an 8 slide intro that gives you most of what you need to know to use the program effectively that opens up when you first launch the program. Some reviewers complained about the red boarders around the protected apps but I did not find them at all disturbing. There are a whole host of apps that are protected by default but it is easy enough to remove (or add) apps from the list. In fact, this last seems to me to be the way you would add or remove protection to or from apps essentially on the fly (almost).

For example,,,,,,

When I opened Opera it opened with protection active. I did not want active protection for this session so I closed Opera, opened the Buffer Zone console and went to "Edit Buffer Zone Programs", scrolled down to Opera, selected it, and then hit the delete button at the top of the console window. Then I opened Opera again and it opened normally, that is un-protected.

To activate Operas protection again I closed Opera, opened the BZ console again, went to "Edit Buffer Zone Programs" and clicked on the plus sign at the top of the window. Then I navigated to the exe file that launches Opera and added it to the list. I opened Opera and it launched protected. It would be nice if you could simply turn protection on or off at will as you can with Sandboxie but its not a big deal unless you will be frequently wanting to slip in and out of protected mode.

If the above strategy is not to your liking another approach that occurred to me that can alleviate this situation is to have a number of browsers on the PC and to delete all but one of them from the list of automatically protected programs. If you want to download or open something you are unsure of you would simply use the browser that is always going to open in protected mode. For anything else you could use one of the other browsers.

I will be testing BZ some more over the next while (when I have time) and if there is anything that I feel would be of interest to others considering the program I will post it. I should mention that BZ has a few other features. one of which is specific automatically hidden folders so data cannot be read by programs running inside the protected app. There are a few other features but they escape me at the moment.

OH yes, I had no crashes and my mouse worked normally while I had the program running.

 

Might be worth testing it against some of the malware that has busted through SBIE in the past to see whether Bufferzone is vulnerable. It might run nicely, but if development is dead then vulnerabilities or bugs aren't going to get fixed. Personally I think you'd be safer getting your problems sorted on a live, well supported and developed program like SBIE or one of the other alternatives.

 

A few more comments as I have been playing with the program a bit more.

- If you right click on the BZ icon on the task-bar and select "Surf Out Of BufferZone" IE opens up unprotected. If you just open IE normally it will open in protected mode. Unfortunately this is not the case for the other browsers I tried.

I also tried disabling BZ from loading at boot. To enable protection all I need to do was to launch BZ from the start menu (I I had to leave BZ service enabled as turning it off prevented BZ from running at all). Turning protection off again was a snap, all I had to do was right click on the BZ task-bar icon and click on "Unload" (or hit alt+u) and all browsers opened unprotected. Unfortunately turning protection back on required me to reboot the PC and then go to the start menu and launch BZ again.

In sum, not a perfect program but not bad at all. I def do prefer it to Sandboxie at this point.

 

Just as Scoobs said,its ancient software and not developed anymore.
So its not patched and current,i for one don't trust it securitywise.
You will be in for a surprise if you google '' Bufferzone vulnerable ? ''

PS : even in 2007 there was no response on reported vulnerabilities to the developer,go figure !

 

Thats odd, CNET has the latest version added Sept. 1, 2009
http://download.cnet.com/BufferZone-Pro-for-XP/3000-18510_4-10501949.html

Mind you at the publishers website it shows that the program is Vista compatible but does not indicate it is 7 compatible.
http://www.trustware.com/BufferZone_System_Requirements/

But then there is this from the BZ forum
http://www.trustware.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2941

So it sounds like a relatively current version.

Also I did not find much to condemn the current version of BZ by doing a ''Bufferzone vulnerabilities'' google search
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&s...CAwQBSgA&q=Bufferzone vulnerabilities&spell=1


Please note I am not trying to start a fight Huppi, just trying to get and present a complete picture of the situation. Perhaps the program has begun to be supported and developed again after some gap in the developer doing so.

 

With regards to BZ and Windows 7 support,it seems that both 32 and 64 bit versions are in various stages of development/planning.

http://www.trustware.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2947

 

No fight at all,if my posts trigger something like that,then sorry for that.
Time will tell if the current incarnation can withstand all the baddies out there.

 

i uninstalled bufferzone. It was extremely slow and made safespace extremely slow too, it also terminates everything if you exit it. I prefer safespace. Avast also wouldn't start with bufferzone installed

 

LOL - I guess so. It would be wise to test these types of apps installed 1 at a time.

 

My testing seemed to work fine but I will keep an eye on things (of course). If its not to my liking I will either go back to what I used before or try Avast. Mind you as was pointed out above Avast is no longer in development so it means it will be less secure and possibly problematic as Windows keeps being upgraded (or downgraded as the case may be), than some other options (VBox might be the way for me to go after-all).

As to being perfectly secure I do not expect any one program is. Thats why these boxie programs are added to existing security set-ups, they should not replace all, or any part of them.

 

avast isn't being developed anymore?

 

ye really? who the hell said Avast isnt being developed? whoever it was, theyre clearly out of the loop...

 

Just repeating what was posted above (I may have misinterpreted what was said, if so my apologies - https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?p=1587228&postcount=31).

 

i think the poster meant pure sandbox programs and not IS suites that include sandboxes.

 

It was mentioned earlier that safespace, which was an alternative to sandboxie and similar to BZ, isn't in development anymore.

 

Well that did not take long ----- I just uninstalled BufferZone. The reason,,,,,even though I had (I though) BufferZone turned off it was copying any file change associated in any way with a browser, to the virtual C: drive. That included any additions I made to my bookmarks in Opera, all Opera setting changes, a MS update session, and some files I download daily to update work data. Thanks, but no thanks.

 

not much of a fan of it either

 

I think the best solution to this sort of thing is to go with the big guns - VMware (or maybe Virtual Box) and be done with it. I will pursue this approach vigorously in the new year.

 

Too fast imo ,i would ask the developer about that.
Ditching it before you really get the hang of it.
Slow down a bit !