PortsLock: New Firewall For Admins

December 9, 2002

SmartLine, Inc. has released a unique security solution on the market that enables Systems Administrators to set permissions on the TCP/IP connections exactly as they can for files and folders on NTFS partitions.

PortsLock is a firewall that offers user-level access controls for Windows NT/2000/XP.

It integrates with the Windows user authentication system and once installed, administrators can assign permissions to TCP/IP connections, just as they would in managing permissions on an NTFS partition of a hard disk. PortsLock lets you control which users can access what TCP/IP based protocols (HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP3, Telnet, etc.) on a local computer, depending on the time of day and day of the week.

You can also set allowed/denied TCP/UDP ports and IP addresses for incoming and outgoing connections. PortsLock is completely transparent to users and only Windows administrators are allowed to set rules.

Administrators which are familiar with IPsec, can think of this as a user-specific IPsec configuration, where user "A" can be allowed access to the web during business hours, but denied FTP traffic and user "B" can only access sites within the corporate network etc.

Additional features include optional traffic auditing (per user setting), remote access and automatic deployment to remote machines. PortsLock is intended for network administrators and requires good knowledge of TCP/IP networking.