Extended Firewall in Avira Premium Security Suite 9
February 4, 2009, 7:43 am
We have introduced a new feature for the Firewall integrated in the Avira Premium Security Suite. The feature is called Privileged applications and is about making the life of a user much easier.
In AV8, if you allow a program to connect to the network, its traffic is going to be filtered through the adapter rules first. This means, for example, that if you want to start a program which needs some responses from the network while the Security Level is High, the incoming traffic will be blocked. So, even if you allowed your application to access the net, it must obey the Adapter rules. If these rules filter some traffic needed by the application, it will simply not function correctly.
Technically speaking, the traffic is now filtered like this:
 Fig. 1: The new firewall architecture.
What has changed?
In the new version of the firewall, for the applications which are marked as privileged we changed the order in which the rules are applied. The adapter rules are ignored for the traffic coming to the process ID of the application which was allowed with the privileged status. From this point on, when you allow an application in the firewall, it will simply function correctly, no matter what kind of security level you have.
How to enable this special status
When the popup for the application is displayed, you must enable the checkbox „allow privileged” and click on the „Allow” button. That’s it…
 Fig. 2: Firewall popup for new applications.
Once you allowed such an application, you can see and change its status in the Configuration Center:
Fig. 4: Configuration for the application popups presets.
WARNING:
This feature is a huge step toward a better usability of the product. However, please be very careful which programs you allow as privileged.
Sorin Mustaca
Manager International Software Development | 
发表于 2010-2-15 16:55:39
