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Does anyone know of a FOSS Firewall for Windows (beehaw.org)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I currently use TinyWall Firewall, it works very well, it's small/portable, no complaints I even donated to the Dev but I would really prefer open source, also it needs to be user friendly like TinyWall so my non-tech family members can/will use it like they do with TinyWall.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

There seems to be a misunderstanding:

A "firewall for" is something one needed with Windows XP and earlier, as in "a piece of software that acted as a firewall".
Nowadays, both Windows 7+ and Linux come with a built-in firewall, that one might want a "GUI for {}'s firewall".

One of such GUIs, is TinyWall, that is also FOSS (GPLv3). I see people have suggested some more.

To be precise, all these options are inferior in functionality to firewalls like ZoneAlarm... but since you're asking for a non-tech friendly solution, they should be adequate.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

ZoneAlarm is trash compared to Suricata or Snort.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Does Suricata or Snort allow the user to block per-process outgoing traffic?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Both do deep packet inspection using netflow protocol and filter using crowd sourced detection rules as well as commercial, process-level filtering on a host operating system to detect network intrusion is unecessarily resource intensive.

https://www.netgate.com/blog/suricata-vs-snort

ZenArmor does the same as both, but also uses python scripts with a fancy graphical interface.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Do people really run zenarmour, snort or suricate on their desktop?
Feels like a network firewall thing to do DPI for the whole house, instead of a per-machine thing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Process-level filtering is to avoid exfiltration from environments where "all processes run as the same user, with full access to all other processes"... which, unfortunately, are still most of them.

DPI is nice to stop incoming attacks, and to detect suspicious outgoing traffic, but it's kind of late when the data is already on the wire, and you won't be able to stop all possible kinds of traffic that way.