Personal Firewall Comparison- Page 1/7
November 3, 2000
By
Robert Richmond
Try searching for the term "personal firewall" with your favorite software search engine. I did, and the results were staggering. Download.com returned nearly 70 different firewalls! How can a person make an informed decision with so many products available? SysOpt.com is here to help. We have taken several of the most popular offerings available and put them to the test. The packages include BlackICE Defender, Internet Firewall 2000, McAfee Personal Firewall, Sygate Personal Firewall, and ZoneAlarm. While other software does exist, these products are the most widely marketed solutions available at the consumer level. The results of this comparison are very surprising.
What is a Personal Firewall?
A personal firewall is a software package that acts as a door for your computer's incoming and outgoing connections. The firewall will only allow authorized communications to pass. The Internet is the largest network ever envisioned, but it can also be the most threatening. Computers connected to the Internet can be subject to tampering, eavesdropping, and vandalism from malicious people seeking to obtain your personal data or create chaos in your life. As the Internet grows, so will this underlying base of unlawful users. Policing the Internet is not a viable option due to its massive complexity, so it is up to individual users to take action themselves.
Personal security is a real-world concern, especially considering the complexity of Microsoft Windows and the proliferation of thousands of Internet-aware applications. The Internet is a hostile environment, and should be treated as such. A dedicated hardware firewall solution would the best choice, but this type of technology often requires a complex understanding of network theory. The cost is also a major objection, as hardware firewalls can run to thousands of dollars. A user-friendly and cost effective solution would come in the concept of a software-based personal firewall. Personal firewalls attempt to protect PCs from various malicious network activities. The most common attack is a denial of service (DoS). DoS attacks exploit vulnerabilities in software to cause the victim's system to either stall or crash. Another popular attack is a Trojan horse, which acts as backdoor, thus allowing an intruder complete access to your system's resources. Most Trojans are housed within unsolicited e-mail messages and should be regarded as viruses.
The Internet Protocol (IP) address is a fundamental networking concept. Each computer on a network must have some kind of identification for data to be directed to and from systems. The IP address identifies each computer within a network, even the Internet. Without an assigned IP number, network data cannot be directed to a computer.
The concept of a port lies at the heart of the networking layer. Each network service has a dedicated port. One port might handle only HTTP web transfers, while another transports only SMTP e-mail data. Within Windows's scope of networking, thousands of these ports exist. For most Internet users, only two or three small segments are actually needed, but the default Windows installation leaves nearly 65,000 ports open for access. These open ports create major security risks. Most personal firewalls attempt to close unneeded ports and filter ones required for standard Internet use. A complete explanation of network theory is outside the scope of this article. If you're seeking more information about personal firewalls and how they relate to networking, you may want to reference the following sources:
A fresh installation of Windows Millennium was used for each firewall tested. The same Internet service provider was used for each testing phase, so results could be consistent. All tests were executed with the default Windows network configuration; no optimizations or changes were applied before or during testing.
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