Since hearing about it long ago and mentioned again on my previously posted thread, I'm simply wondering if you could give me some details on how it works and how usability is handled? I'm most of all thinking about software like SandboxIE and DW for example which often means one or more additional steps for a lot of things involving browsing and installing, etc. - that simply isn't my bag. In other words, how does secure browsing work to improve the protection, especially when browsing the net, while keeping the same ease of use of the computer - downloading and installing included?
We're currently developing a secure browser which is a bit different from the conventional secure browser - rather than securing the OS from the browser which we would consider "browser sandboxing" akin to Sandboxie/others, we're securing the browser from the OS so if you have some undetected keylogger or screengrabber or other identity stealing malware on your system, we will prevent it from seeing anything going on within your browser. We also have IP address cross referencing, DNS poisoning, and a number of other protections built in behind-the-scenes. We are planning functionality for browser sandboxing but we agree that it does introduce more of an annoyance than real security for many users who don't want to bother answering another prompt. Instead of this, we will have an exploit prevention layer which will only warn the user when a program runs from an exploit, not when they run a program from a legitimate location. The browser exploit prevention is currently going through internal testing and we suspect it will not make it into the first beta of the secure browser but probably into a subsequent v3 secure browser build, if not, definitely into v4. Let me know if you have any other questions with this I know we've been pretty quiet regarding the secure browser but we entirely changed direction about a month ago, starting over from fresh with the secure browser because we realized users want this security as transparent as possible. If you've seen the pdf on our website, it still reflects the old secure browser - where the security occurs when the browser is in a full screen window isolated from the rest of the OS. Granted, this may be helpful to some users who want differentiation between their workspaces, however, for the majority of users this is an annoyance as it prevents the ability to copy/paste between the browser and other programs or to work on multiple things at once. So, the challenge for us is providing the equivalent protection as a full-screen isolated browser session in a non-full-screen session but we've turned around and are now providing much more protection than we were before We're working on a few new protection components currently but betas should be ready within the next couple weeks.
Okay, thank you. Well, I do need to know what browsers are supported, since I use Opera and Opera is definitely not as obvious as FF or IE.
Current Firefox, IE, and Chrome are supported but the protection happens below the browser level so we will be able to add Opera without much trouble (and we're planning Safari support as well). We're just waiting to get the primary browsers stable and then we'll work on the idiosyncrasies between the others
Thanks for the update Joe, interesting. Keep the info coming Very much looking forward to the Beta release.
This will be a valuable feature. I usually run IE sandboxed, but cant under Windows 7 (well, not as a forced programme), so look forward to this. Puss
I always found Sandboxie did the job with IE, but it couls prove inconvenient - for instance, issues with Messenger not interacting with it, having BitTorrent start in a sandbox when you click on a torrent file in sandboxed IE etc. All very safe, but a pain in the......... Puss