Shoutbox

I recently came across a free program called 'Sandboxie'.

It runs a program in a sandbox, which is a closed environment so that the programs can't mess up your system. Much like a VM, but way less resource intensive and no need to install OSs, rebooting, and all other things you might need to do (I know it has some limitations compared to a real VM because of that of course).

I wonder if somebody has some experience with it, advantages, disadvantages, etc. Are there other alternatives (not talking about virtual machines, but about simple sandboxes)?

i know that hackers/crackers use them to test worms/viruses/etc. and i think whats that Microsoft used with Vista too. ive only heard a bit about them though.

its takes out a certian amont of memory and hard disk space and creates an environment that is only connected to the rest of the computer by reading from it, but i cant write to it.

you run a program in it and it carries out whatever you wanted it to and logs everything that happens. and best bit is if something goes wrong, you get rid of everything, and start a new sandbox! it also stops anything being written to the hard drive, and writes it into the sandbox so there's no chance of anything harmful being installed in your hard drive. its good for browsing, just run firefox/P2P programs in it and any viruses that may be downloaded goes into the sandbox instead.

I don't think Sandboxie is quite what you're thinking of ICD. That sounds more like a virtual machine.

Personally, I tried Sandboxie for a while (I was actually testing out the photo album.zip virus, that didn't really work in there though), and it works fairly well, but it's not as good as a real VM for complex applications - Visual C# kept dying on me when I was using it.

It doesn't do anything to your PC, so there's no harm in downloading and playing. I don't know any alternatives though, sorry.

Why not just run the program as a less privileged user? One without write access to anywhere? There's a gotcha, though, because flaws can still get through if your graphics system isn't secure.

with restricted users there are still many holes. Besides you need to create yet other accounts and all, you need to log out of the current user, etc. That is exactly what I don't want (just as rebooting and/or starting other OS's). Also, I don't want to restrict the programs to only reading.

ICD, I know what it does though. And reading their pages it sounds exactly as what I want, though I just wondered if anybody has used that program before and has good/bad experiences with it. Or if they think another alternative is better.

Thanks for the input so far though...

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Originally posted by CookieRevised
with restricted users there are still many holes. Besides you need to create yet other accounts and all, you need to log out of the current user, etc. That is exactly what I don't want (just as rebooting and/or starting other OS's).

ICD, I know what it does though. I just wondered if anybody has used that program before and has good/bad experiences with it. OR if they think another alternative is better.

Thanks for the input so far though...

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I don't have any experience doing multi-user under Windows, though I'm sure it's possible to do with NT-based kernels. It shouldn't require logging off your main account, I think. You're right though, there may be other holes if that user has services started too, or if, for example, there were bugs in the TCP/IP stack and your application must use it.

EDIT: but sandboxie looks like it's worth a try. I mean, if it will do the job, and doesn't require the effort of actually working out how to use WMU, sounds good to me.