App Virtualization with Sandboxie

With Sandboxie, you can download any application from the Net and run it on your machine without worrying about whether it will become a security risk

Friday, February 01, 2008

Virtualization is today the most common buzzword in the market, and not without good reason. There are lots of different ways of doing virtualization, and in this article we'll tell you about application virtualization. We'll use a utility called Sandboxie for the job. It allows you to run any application on your desktop in its own virtual environment. What this means is that it won't be able to harm the rest of your machine. So even if the program crashes, or is a malicious one, it won't affect the rest of your system. This can be a boon for anybody, be it desktop users in an office, laptop users, or even home users. It just enhances your desktop security.

Sandboxie ensures that the application running inside the sandbox never writes data directly to your hard disk (though, if required the application can read data directly from your hard disk). As a result if a malware gets executed, it will only effect the virtual environment, which can be later discarded to protect your system. While browsing, Sandboxie downloads all files onto the sandbox. You can either recover these files immediately or at the end of the session. You can even discard them. Sandboxie could also be configured for monitoring applications, and issuing pop-up alerts if the monitored application gets executed outside the sandbox. It works only on Windows 2000, XP, Vista and Windows Server 2003.

Sandboxie supports multiple application sandboxes and you can have different settings for each sandbox

Installing and Using it
Install the software and configure the virtual container folder for the Sandboxie. By default it is 'C:\Sandbox\% USER%\%SANDBOX%'.

To change this go to the menu bar, select Sandbox >Set Container Folder option. From the popup window, choose the partition where you want to put the container and provide the complete path. Select Sandbox>Create New Sandbox option to create a new sandbox. In the popup window provide name for the new sandbox. The new sandbox will be visible on the main console of Sandboxie. To define the respective settings of the sandbox that you just created, right-click on the sandbox and choose 'Sandbox Settings'. In the following window, go to Resource Access and define the resources that programs running in this sandbox must have access to. You can define which programs should have access to Internet, and to which files and folders program should have direct access or read only access etc.

To launch an application, right-click on the sandbox, go to the 'Run Sandboxed' option and select the 'From Start Menu' . In the floating window, simply choose the application that you want to run in the sandbox. Now, you can use this application just like a regular application without worrying about security of your system. You can even install applications inside sandbox and run them in a completely isolated environment.

We tested plenty of applications inside Sandboxie such as Firefox, IE, Thunderbird, P2P and IM apps. It worked smoothly at all times, even when we simultaneously ran an application's virtualized thread as well as normal thread. We even downloaded a malware, installed it inside the sandbox and then discarded it after a couple of days. Later on when we ran the AV scan, we found no malware on the system.

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