Comodo Firewall Protection Guide Project

[AtlBo]

I don't know if anyone else is as interested in this as I am. I would like to do a schematic of the protections and protection zones of Comodo Firewall and of the priority structures of the protections with various settings choices (auto-sandbox overrides HIPS with this or that setting or "Run Restricted" causes this, etc.). Then I would like to link the protections to settings in the Firewall to show how various settings choices yield an output.

The whole idea is to keep the schematic as simple as possible, while covering the settings fully. The biggest issue here is that I think this is going to require a deeper knowledge than I have of CF at the present time. Anyway, I would burst at the opportunity to work with any of you who might be interested in this type of project. I can be quite skilled with graphics and conceptualizations, so that's mostly how I would like to contribute if anyone else would like to be involved. I don't mind doing grunt work and even then lots of it to finish a project.

I feel confident that if I or maybe a team of us here or just a few were to work together for a few days, we could come up with something that would help everyone erase the mysteries of using CF from their experience. Seriously, how often do we even address more meaningful questions about the program, such as:

• "What are the logical priority overrides (how Comodo treats settings choices priority-wise) in CF settings?" or
  
• "What do CF HIPS do actually (I have seen videos on the effectiveness of HIPS and I can see they are good) and how can they be improved?" or
  
• "Why can't Comodo get rid of the bugs in CF/CIS?"
• How does CF compare to other firewalls when it comes to presenting information on internet connections and connection attempts?
• How good is CF at blocking startup changes and monitoring Task Scheduler?

or questions about the company or its other programs, such as:

• "What is Comodo's information gathering policy and do they live up to the policy?" or
  
• "Why aren't Comodo's products more integrateable with each other?" or
  
• "Why is Comodo Backup not more security oriented (protect stored backup data from malware) and/or just plain better?" or
  
• "Why did Comodo stop work on Comodo Programs Manager?" or, most importantly,
  
• "How can Comodo improve the Firewall from where it is now?", etc.

Many questions I feel we could unlock in a meaningful way if the firewall could be explained with a graphic...something users can see and easily understand.

On the subject of protection priority overrides, I feel I should say that this is something that is for me very important to understand about protection software. It helps me keep in mind what the software does not do for me. I need to be able to visually connect to the logical protection sequence of a security program across all of its protection vectors and for all scenarios of a possible attack. I mean, I need to know what will respond first, etc. and also what the program will or won't detect.

Honestly, I simply cannot conceptualize the words about Comodo Firewall in their documentation or in any list of settings choices I have ever seen for whatever reason, and I am completely lost to grasp from the CF GUI or text explanations concerning the scope of protections with CF. I feel like I am like a deer looking at the headlights so to speak. Connections are a high priority with me, also. Comodo Firewall seems to treat them less importantly than other programs I have seen like ESET. So, for example, I like to see a program that alerts when a site is actively pinging ports on a machine here as ESET will do. Is this a weakness with CF? It seems like some questions are missing from the discussion for me at the present time that I would like to have answers for, so I want to try to answer these basic questions first.

I have no idea how I would go about putting together a project like this, but I would basically be willing to go out of my way for a few days or a week to work on it full time. Doesn't have to be a priority to do this immediately or anything, but, if this gets someone's motor running, I would be willing to start my motor any time!

Please feel free to post any thoughts on anything above. I promise it will help me if noone else. I'd rather not get into a discussion about all the questions I listed though. I really just want to put together a cool graphic on Comodo Firewall's protections...maybe even then grade them by element. Also, maybe we can come up with a formula that can be applied to other security programs that include a firewall or maybe even all security programs.

Thanks to any who made it this far for reading.

 

[shmu26]

this is a challenging project. COMODO 10 is about to come out of beta, and version 10 has important changes and improvements. Maybe it's better to wait until then?
just an idea.

 

[AtlBo]

shmu26. Yes, that's a good idea. I have a rating system I'm working on for security software that rates the program across "protection vectors" rather than just in an overall sense. The idea is to come up with a final rating as the total of all added together. Just getting started. I would like to maybe be able to add some schematics of the program's protections priorities with various settings changes.

I'll keep an eye on Comodo Beta. When 10 rolls out maybe I can repost the idea...

Here's a simplified view of the rating system:

I think each of the details sections should have set categories too. Might need to somehow make them much bigger overall.

 

[AtlBo]

Well, here's another I guess 20 minutes in this. I know it can be improved :

I guess for now it's 8 categories. If anyone thinks of anything please let me know about it. So I guess what I would LIKE to do is come up with a rating system and a protection schematic for each security program that has a firewall...or for all of them I guess idk.

 

[Wave]

I agree that it may be quite challenging, and that you should probably wait until the release of COMODO 10; nevertheless, this is something I would have expected Comodo to do themselves... It's a shame that the customers have to make informative posts on how their

If anyone thinks of anything please let me know about it.

Maybe self-protection could be one; depends on if you think that'd be a necessary category.

 

[AtlBo]

Hey Wave. Thanks for the comment. I did a little work and it's added to the second picture. Maybe you didn't see the pic. It's the second to last one called "Performance Reliability and Self-Monitoring". Took out Drive Protection since that could be covered with all the cats.

If these were the cats, it seems to me like the sandbox covers alot of these areas. Like maybe it should be considered a form of default deny in the protection scope of things. At the same time, it adds to personal file protection, and system and settings protection. I think Comodo Firewall would rack up big points with the sandbox.