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Drive Sentry

Posted on the September 26th, 2009 under Software by admin

A firewall for your hard drive

There’s no quicker way to infect your system than to tread online without the aid of a firewall. Unscrupulous saboteurs the world over are constantly on the hunt for unprotected PCs, and when they find them, it’s open season for unleashing keyloggers, dialers, Trojans, and other toxic trash the riff-raff carry in their arsenals. But with a firewall, you always know exactly what’s trying to access your PC, leaving you in command of who comes and goes.

Apply that same philosophy to your hard drive and you have DriveSentry. Borrowing a page from Microsoft Vista and its now infamous UAC, DriveSentry intercepts write requests to your hard drive, giving you an opportunity to deny or allow the action. To prevent being inundated with permission requests from harmless applications, DriveSentry implements an auto-advisor feature. Every time a new program runs, the advisor dials home and looks for a match against a whitelist of trusted applications, as well as a blacklist of known threats. Like your old high school cliques, programs are labeled according to how DriveSentry and the majority opinion among the community of users view them. A good program could potentially be deemed dangerous, or vice versa, though we didn’t run into any issues with mistagged programs during our tests. We did, however, run into an annoying number of pop-up alerts, even for trusted applications. Opening Notepad, for example, prompted a pop-up letting us know the advisor was dialing home, followed by a second alert telling us the program has been cleared to run. We dig the diligence but not the constant cries for attention.

DriveSentry’s greatest strength lies in its level of customization. The dizzying array of options is enough to overwhelm even staunch RTS fans raised on micromanagement, but for those willing to put in the time, you’re afforded a meticulous level of control over what files every program can or cannot write to. You can also create custom rules blocking a program’s access to entire folders or drives. Removable media, such as your USB key and optical discs, are protected too. And for armchair auditors, the Logs tab keeps track of every attempted write ever made and whether or not it was allowed.

We tried our best to thwart DriveSentry, but viruses and spyware never stood a chance, as long as we intervened. Should less-savvy users ignore the warnings, or worse, should a band of hackers infiltrate DriveSentry’s servers, the advisor could conceivably feed bad advice.

Even with the potential risks, DriveSentry offers a level of protection rivaled by only BufferZone. Combined with an anti-malware suite, this is as close as it comes to creating an impenetrable defense; just prepare yourself for a steady, and annoying, stream of alerts.