Development Central

I’ve started using Sandboxie on my system as another line of defense. Steve Gibson’s Security Now! podcast turned me on to it. I haven’t used it long enough to swear by it, but I think it’s a good idea.

Update - February 26, 2009

I’m liking this program. I’ve got both Firefox and Thunderbird running in the sandbox now, with the contents automatically deleting when no program is running. Email, bookmarks, etc. are persistent (there are handy options for these), and Sandboxie prompts to persist files saved to the desktop. I’ve hidden several directories from the sandboxed programs completely. The browser and email client automatically run sandboxed regardless of how I launch them (even with Launchy).

It takes a small amount of getting used to. I saved an attachment to a non-persistent directory and almost forgot about it prior to cleaning the sandbox (since it doesn’t prompt for unspecified directories). By default the VPN client my work uses didn’t work with IE in the sandbox (but it’s probably doable with some configuration). Apparently iTunes can override Sandboxie somehow - clicking on a Podcast link brought up some interesting dialogs. But other than these, I haven’t run into any significant issue with Sandboxie. It works.