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What operating systems have built in support for firewalling specific applications?
by bscphil 7y ago
What operating systems have built in support for firewalling specific applications?
- hirsin 7y agoWindows has for over a decade, I assume Linux does too.
- viraptor 7y agoDepends what you mean by built-in. On Linux you can easily start something either in a namespace with no network, or filter out network calls by syscalls. Selinux/apparmor/tomoyo give you more fine grained control over what can be done over the network.
- dogmatism 7y agoLinux generally comes with iptables which can be used for it, but more efficiently most distributions have some system for access control like SELinux or apparmor which can also do it. Sorry not familiar if this is a thing on Windows/Mac/BSD's. In fact I think Android has SELinux built in, but not user accessible without root.
- toast0 7y agoDesktop windows has this. FreeBSD ipfw can firewall by userid, and Android runs each app under a different user (and would probably run apps in jails on FreeBSD, jail IDs are also available for firewalling)
- nvr219 7y agoWindows XP and later
- squiggleblaz 7y agoHaving moved from Windows to Linux partially because Windows was about as secure as a flyscreen door, I've recently switched back to Windows. Whenever a version of an app wants to provide a network service, Windows first asks if this specific app can provide network services on this class of network (public connection or private connection). So it is not just builtin, but for a particular class of restriction even easy to use. Blocking consumption of resources is an advanced feature though. I used to use a program called "firestarter" on Linux, which provided a way to block specific apps. Long time since I've done that though, since most of the untrusted apps on Linux are Chrome and the ones you run in Firefox.