Sandboxing Applications with Sandboxie

Sandboxing is a security mechanism where applications can be isolated and activities can be restricted. I find Sandboxie the most effective application to provide sandboxing. I have tried many free alternatives, but they were not able to support all applications. The first sandboxing application I know is GreenBorder which was founded in 2001 then bought by Google in 2007. There's already some speculations that GreenBorder will be integrated with Google Chrome. Other alternatives include Returnil and Comodo Time Machine. What can we do with these apps?

Downloading and evaluating many different software downloaded from the Internet means decreasing system performance and requiring us to uninstall them one by one after. By using Sandboxie, we can install and run these programs inside the Sandbox, which means all installations and registry writes are diverted in a special or virtual folder or space. Once we're done in trying these applications, we can simply empty the sandbox space.

We can also use Sandboxie to open potentially malicious programs. Any changes made to our actual files or files outside the sandbox will only exist inside the sandbox. But do note that they are good only for diverting disk changes and not for preventing our data from being sent across the Internet. Some programs actually try to evade from this sandboxing process. We can also use Sandboxie to monitor the registry changes and other files that a program writes to our system.

Sandboxie is a very promising tool. It's easy to use, although it lacks a good GUI for editing the configuration files. It allows many customization features too.

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