DefenseWall vs. running under a LUA?

Guess Ilya would be the one with the most insight (that's just logic ), but I would be more than interested in other members' thoughts too. What about the differences in terms of security, usability, reliability, stability, etc.? Make your input on the subject.

Cheers!

 

I'm also interested in this.

 

I just discovered a problem for me personally and my computer - running a game called Dragonica, being a MMO, it needs to check for updates everytime it starts. So what if I run it as an admin, even automatically? Well, for some reason my explorer.exe apparently restarts then, and causes all forms of inconvenience, so I'm gonna start using DefenseWall.

 

Yes, surely there is a difference. DefenseWall offer more defense with simple control over it. Also, it do not rely on MS protection techniques, so, invulnerable to the "privilege escalation" attacks.

 

Security - Defensewall does a lot more stuff than LUA, and tries to protect you against many things that LUA doesn't care about, such as keylogging. LUA isn't a mechanism to protect the limited user account itself from whoever is using it, it's a mechanism to protect the system and other user accounts. So in this sense running Defensewall can provide more "security and control" than running just as LUA. The Defensewall website seems to say that running Defensewall to protect your limited user account is a good idea. As for me, personally? I find LUA perfectly adequate for my needs, since I generally try to avoid executing malicious code in the first place. Those who desire something more could try a whitelist SRP to prevent unknown, new executables from running in the limited user account - such a combo would offer strong protection against any malware currently in the wild. Or, they could go with something like Defensewall if they feel like it. I don't.

Usability - Depends on what you like. LUA is "simple" - there's no extra GUI or anything. If something requires admin rights, depending on your OS and settings, it either fails immediately and says "access denied" or something to that direction, or asks you to provide admin credentials. That's that. If you want to run something as admin, you use something like Run As or one of the zillion utilities which can be used to elevate privileges when needed, or you log out and log in to the admin account to do your thing - or use fast user switching. With Defensewall, you have a security software with lots of features, and a GUI to control those features. Some of that may take time to learn, and some features may occasionally make doing the tasks you want to do slower, just like some things are slower to do in LUA. Try both and see which you prefer, if you don't want to blindly trust the recommendations of anyone supporting either Defensewall or LUA.

Stability - LUA wins here automagically, since it's code already present in the system no matter what you do with it, whereas installing Defensewall means adding new software to the system, with new code, and potentially also new bugs. Note, though, that I've never used Defensewall in any way, so I can't say what kind of problems, if any, its users experience in practice. For all I know, Defensewall may be as stable as bedrock and never cause any problems at all to anyone. But even in that case, it cannot be more stable than just running LUA, so...

Sounds like you need to file a bug report to the developers of that game.

 

I think for me, the biggest advantage of Defensewall over LUA is convenience. No logging in or out of accounts to do something simple, like defrag for instance, although I know you can use run as or Su run or something like that. Another big advantage for me is the ability to specify files and folders that I do not want anything nefarious (untrusted) to have access to. I have the convenience of running as Admin with even more protection with running in LUA. I have always looked at Defensewall as LUA on steroids.

 

Sounds like the developers of your game are still in Win 9.x mode. You could possibly change the write privileges for the directory where the updates are saved. Games developers are some of the worst offenders when it comes to writing settings, updates, etc. to the program files directory instead of the user profile.

 

I think I'm pretty convinced by now that for me personally, DW would be the best choice - too many factors weigh for DW compared to LUA, even with utilities included to simplify running under a LUA.

Looking forward to the usability improvements in DW v3.


Thanks a lot so far on the input, it's been helpful.

 

good desicion

 

Some questions going through my mind regarding LUA...


1. If I run my defragmenter program of choice as an administrator, OR, alternatively, give it "Full Control" for the Users group, is it able to do its job?

2. Is it safe for me to set my "file-drive" to "Full Control" for Users group, as I want to be able to use torrents and stuff without a bunch of hassle?

 

I don't remember myself having to bump a thread, but this feels like it for me, so prepare yourselves; BUMP!