Maybe I've missed it on this site, but does anyone know of a personal firewall app that can be run from a USB drive?
It would be useful when using my USB drive on a public computer to prevent other PC's on the network from pinging my PC, and in general, accessing it at all.
Thank you.
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A true firewall running portably is technically impossible, as a real firewall needs to hook into the OS too deeply.
Some security providers offer portable firewalls, but they have very limited functionality, and from what I have seen so far, are firewalls in name only and lack far too much functionality to be a truly useful security tool.
That may be enough for working on a temporary PC as it only need to block all traffic on all ports so that I can browse the web if needed but anyone else on the network can't ping me.
I did find this firewall( http://sterjosoft.com/ ) which does this but haven't tested how many changes it makes to the PC to determine if it's truly portable or not.
Thank you for your input!
Mosh4Him
>it only need to block all traffic on all ports so that I can browse the web if needed but anyone else on the network can't ping me.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
Maybe the OP is talking about incoming ICMP messages.
I think this portable firewalls are freeware: ghostwall, winpooch, sterjo, windows7firewallcontrol by sphinx.
This is the way I do, create a or multi portable windows operating systems (XP/W7/W8). You can install any existing firewalls on that system and boot the system basically on any pc and you are on your own.
There is a relative new & very nice small freeware firewall "Tinywall by pados".
hope somebody can make it portable!
why to make any firewall portable when only way a firewall has any reasonable function is when it is loaded before the whole ethernet connection is build up.
So one needs to run it before the operating system runs up, so what do do with anything portable as it can run only on already booted and running system.
Installed firewalls for windows do in fact replace part of the windows system, they just break the native installed components and make the whole system more complex, unstable.
As there is a native firewall running in windows anyway, and to replace it you need to reboot the system, the use of any kind of portable firewall is simply nothing.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland