Sygate Personal Firewall 5.6

What's your experience with this firewall? Is it good?
What are preference and weakness of this firewall.

Thanks!!


Best regards,

izi

 

The only weakness is no support for proxy and a slight high resource need considering it is not a true sandboxing firewall, otherwise very stable and supports ICS.

 

What is sandboxing firewall?

Best regards,

izi

 

Sandboxing can be described as outbound app filtering, that is checking each and every program trying to access the net, lets you set permissions for them.

 

Sygate is generally a good firewall, however, in some recent tests I have found that it allows packets in to listening ports regardless of your app rules (and doesn't log them either). This can be blocked by adding a general firewall rule, but you shouldn't have to do this.

There is also the proxy issue as mentioned by Arup.

Also, if you do use it, you should go into the Advanced settings for each app and make sure you untick the "allow server" box for each app. You don't want to allow inbound connections to apps unless absolutely necessary.

 

Sygate forum has some really good tips on how to create rules to block open ports, otherwise if you dont have a proxy, it is a very good program.

 

Arup - I'll have to check out the Sygate forums for that. I had one app (Treewalk) that listens. I told Sygate in an app rule to allow incoming traffic only on remote port 53 to that program. Sygate however allowed incoming traffic from ANY remote port, ignoring my app rule/settings. That would appear to be a problem... If I hadn't had CHX running in the background, logging, I never would have seen this as Sygate didn't log it either.

I have also seen other instances of what appear to be problems. I also had MSTask.Exe listening on port 1025 at one time. In comes a random packet to port 1025, and Sygate asks me if it's ok to allow. I say No, Block it. Sygate appears to block it and log it. But then later when subsequent packets come in to port 1025, Sygate neither logs nor blocks them as instructed earlier. Found them in the CHX logs again.

Both of the above situations indicate a problem. But I'll have a read of the Sygate forums and see what I can find...

 

Where are the Sygate forums?

 

Right here: http://forums.sygate.com/vb/