BufferZone Home 1.6 - 08 Review

General

There is a Belief that only when using two computers you will be 100% protected, one computer for the Internet and the other for the confidential files like bills and other.
You can see this approach in many government and military organization, but for the Home user it's nor economical or strait forward to maintain two separate computers for Home usage.
To this market plunged Trustware with there BufferZone product, not only Trustware, you can see some new competitor for there product, like GreenBorder or SecureOL.

The technological solution is name Virtualization, basically having a computer in a computer, like PC in a PC.

BufferZone creates a virtual zone in the PC, this Zone is separated from the real OS, however it's very flexible and transparent to the user, in the virtual zone named BufferZone you can do whatever you want, even run viruses and they will not effect the real OS , where all you vital info is located.
More in the General Operation section.

Installation

The truth nothing to it , just next and some more next and you can restart it and start working.

General operation

Again like many products the general operation is the section where you get most of the problems.

In the general speaking the product is transparent, you start to work and can do whatever you want, Trustware did some cleaver thing, they and we know that programs like IE and Messengers or even SkyPe pusses a security Hole in the computer, so in the default many known programs (you can see the list in the BufferZone UI ) are running in the BufferZone e environment , meaning running in the Virtual environment separated from the real OS, running IE in the BufferZone has great benefits, like going to any site and even installing Spyware in malicious way , the every program running in the BZ (BufferZone) don’t get real File system nor Registry, so by installing any Spyware, Trojan and running Viruses in the BufferZone you computer doesn't get infected nor Trojan can take information from your Computer and send it to the outside world.
Programs running in the BufferZone are given Network acess only if ther are part of the List of known programs, this list can be edited by the user using the Local UI of BufferZone, by doing that a Trojan that is not from the Lost cant get network access (cool).

Anything running in the BZ has certain restrictions place on it :-Can't modify trusted files (eg virus behavior, or Trojan injection etc)-Can't create hooks (keyloggers)-Can't autostart (virtual registry is not read at startup)-Can't install drivers-Can't copy&paste from trusted files

Some other cool features you got is the forbidden option, by righ clicking any file you get a nice shell of BufferZone allowing to move files from the BufferZone to the Real OS and the opposite, also you can Forbid from a file to run, that’s a great feature adding the ability to control the BufferZone configuration by password, you can forbid programs running (good parental protection) also many time you have Trojan that you can delete so you can just right-click them and choose forbidden so files will not run anymore.

The greatest thing about BufferZone, it's that you don’t see any popup or nag screen, everything is strait forward and that’s could be also the product Achilles' heel , cause not getting any alerts doesn’t say it is a good thing .. you cant never know that you are really protected without getting any feedback from the product.

Also the UI client is not so clear, you don’t understand what is protected and what is not, also when moving files to the BufferZone environment they are moved to a location and you get a Virtual File, that kinda annoying you never know what file you are dealing with.

Security tests

TrojDemo.exe = pass

tooleaky.exe = Pass

ProcX.exe = Pass, the ProcX.exe couldn’t kill the BufferZone process

firehole.exe = Pass

pcaudit.exe = pass

pcaudit2.exe = pass

Modified Taskman = pass. Couldn’t kill the BufferZone process

Ghost.exe = pass

Advanced Process termination = pass

Copycat = pass

AWFT = pass

Overall

Great Concept, Nice product, but needs more work.
Also in the contrary to the AntiHook, Trustware BufferZone is pin point the (Stupid) Home user that doesn't know and don’t want to know only to be protected , savvy users will probably stick with more Alert wise application , but hi you have more Home (stupid ) users than computer Savvy users .. it's a good deal for Trustware

Grade = 8/10