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Make sure
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To prevent being spammed, do not publish your personal e-mail address on public sites.
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 Kerio Personal Firewall 4 - part I
by Andrew Cooper
I decided to start my review of personal firewalls with new Kerio Personal Firewall 4. This program has a good reputation among many Internet users and I'm interested to see if it's justified.
I believe a personal firewall should meet the following criteria:
- Security.
- Functionality.
- Ease of use.
Briefly, here is what these mean to me.
Security is not just the ability of the program to protect your files and folders from unauthorized access. It needs to include protection from the other Internet threats, such as remote denial-of-service attacks, data leaking, port scanning, Trojan horses and spyware.
By functionality I'm referring to how many useful (practical, helpful) features the program has and how they are performed, their speed of performance and their effectiveness.
Ease of use is simply how quick and easy it is for us to use the program and get it to do what we intend it to do.
With these criteria in mind we'll evaluate Kerio Personal Firewall.
Security
The program provides four main tools to protect your computer: Network Security, System Security, Intrusion Detection System and Web Privacy.
Network Security defines rules for applications when they interact on the Internet or trusted networks (a home network, for instance).
You can choose what Kerio should do when an app tries to establish an outgoing or incoming connection: whether to always permit it, always deny it or to ask you to decide each time whether to permit or deny that specific connection.
The list of applications for which rules are defined can be seen from the Application tab:
As you can see in the screenshot, the other two tabs are Predefined and Trusted Area. Predefined shows global security settings and Trusted Area lets you designate a home or office network as trusted. Kerio allows you to define different rules for interactions on the Internet and your trusted networks so the security policies are appropriate.
For those of us who need or like to create custom rules for particular scenarios there is a Packet Filter feature (the button's at the right bottom corner of the Applications tab next to the Refresh button). This enables you to define a rule based on such parameters as: application, protocol, port, direction, remote address or IP group (manually added via the IP Groups tab). Each parameter has two actions to choose from: deny or permit.
The only complaints I have of this Packet Filter feature is you cannot specify a time or time interval for the rule you are creating and there are no IP protocols on the list of available protocols. However, these are not difficult for the developers to add in future versions.
Continue to Part II
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