Breaking News About Comodo CIS V4
CIS ver 4 is planned to be in moderators hands on Monday (12/7/09). A public beta then will be available shortly after, depending on the bugs that the moderators find.
As everyone knows, you can expect the following new features in CIS ver 4:
1. Sandboxing
2. Time Machine Technology
3. Behaviour Blocker/Analysis.
4. Antivirus is rewritten internally, and for cleaning it will have "acid like" cleaning capabilities to remove the hardest of malware.
There are some things I would like to point out with CIS ver 4, those things are: Sandboxing, Time Machine, and the GUI. I will start with the Sandboxing Component and how it will work.
Sandboxing in CIS
The sandboxing component uses file system/registry virtulization + limited user accounts to achieve it's protection. The code written for the sandbox is the same for both 32bit and 64bit platforms. Expect Windows XP 64bit. There are limitations in XP 64bit which doesn't make it possible to support it. However, Vista 64 and later will have it.
How it works is very simple and straight forward: Trusted applications will run outside the sandbox, Untrusted applications will run inside the sandbox. The sandbox will NOT work as a on-demand sandbox for experienced users to simply sandbox some applications. It will work as a default-deny sandbox where untrusted applications will be run in the sandbox automatically and will be automatically denied any access, Defense+ will automatically deny sandboxed applications too. The only other Alerts you will get for untrusted applications (malware related) are off course Antivirus Alerts, Buffer overflow alerts, Defense+ malware heuristic alerts. The Sandbox will ignore installers/updaters/trusted applications. You will only get one Alert from Defense+ for these type of applications which is "Run with elevated privileges" alert and the alert language will be the same every time. Sandboxing simply makes Defense+ smarter and quieter.
Time Machine
Time Machine integration in CIS 4 is not seamless. If you have Time Machine on your system, CIS will make use of some of it and when you see a Alert, there is an option to create a snapshot using Time Machine. If you don't have time machine, CIS will simply use System Restore. There is not much more to say for this.
The GUI
If you were part of the Usability Study Group, The USG were discussing ways to improve the GUI in CIS and even created mock GUI's. Reason being is that CIS 4 would take ALOT long to get here (We are probably talking another 12 months from now or more) So minimal changes were made in the GUI. However, no work or suggestion was lost and the GUI overhaul is shifted to the next major CIS release.
