The Sandbox - An Introduction
Comodo Internet Security's new sandbox is an isolated operating environment for unknown and untrusted applications. Running an application in the sandbox means that it cannot make permanent changes to other processes, programs or data on your 'real' system. Comodo have integrated sandboxing technology directly into the security architecture of Comodo Internet Security to complement and strengthen the Firewall, Defense+ and Antivirus modules.
The smart application control mechanism performs security inspections whenever you start an application and automatically sandboxes unknown applications so that they can NOT do any harm to your system.
Applications in the sandbox are executed under a carefully selected set of privileges and write to a virtual file system and registry instead of the real system. This delivers the smoothest user experience possible by allowing unknown applications to run and operate as they normally would while denying them the potential to cause lasting damage.
After an unknown application has been placed in the sandbox, CIS also automatically queues it for submission to Comodo Cloud Scanners for automatic behavior analysis. Firstly, the files undergo another anti-virus scan on our servers. If the scan discovers the file to be malicious, then it is designated as malware, the result is sent back to the local installation of CIS and the local black-list is updated. If the scan does not detect that the file is malicious then its behavior will be monitored by running it in a virtual environment within Comodo's Instant Malware Analysis (CIMA) servers and all its activities are recorded. If these behaviors are found to be malicious then the signature of the executable is automatically added to the antivirus black list. If no malicious behavior is recorded then the file is placed into 'Unrecognized Files' (for execution within the sandbox) and will be submitted to our technicians for further checks. The cloud scanning processes takes around 15 minutes to complete and report their results back to CIS.
By uniquely deploying 'sandboxing as security', CIS 2012 offers improved security, fewer pop-ups and greater ease of use than ever before.
Refer to the following sections for more details on sandbox:
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