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Checkmark Desktop Firewall Certification and Rising Firewall (2008/10/20 08:22)

One of our visitors asked us a question about Rising Firewall passing Checkmark Desktop Firewall Certification. He asked how it was possible that Rising scored so bad in our tests while it was able to pass the certification by West Coast Labs. This blog post is about what Checkmark Desktop Firewall Certification really means and how it is related to Firewall Challenge testing.

On 27th September 2008, Beijing Rising International Software Co., Ltd. published the information that Rising Firewall won Checkmark Desktop Firewall Certification. According to West Coast Labs, the product must achieve an effective level of protection against hostile attacks from outside and prevent unauthorized local applications from accessing the local network. According to the mentioned press release of Rising:

The five shinning key features of this software that led to getting this certification are:

1. Multi-Account Management by the Firewall
The firewall provides two accounts: an administrator account and a user account. A function is provided by the firewall which enables the switch between the two accounts.

2. Trojan Identification Technology
Through heuristic virus scan technology, when a program is connected to the Internet, the Trojan scanner will scan the program.

3. IE Function Call Interception
As IE provides an open Com component call interface, it may be called by malicious programs. This function checks the program which needs to call the IE interface.

4. Anti-Phishing and Anti-Trojan Websites
The website provides a set of powerful and upgradeable blacklist rules, which contain a list of websites that are illegal, highly risky and/or highly hazardous. Using the blacklist rules, any access to the listed websites will be prohibited.

5. Module Test
The firewall can control access to the Internet by all modules. When an application accesses the Internet, the firewall will check the authorization of the module to see if approval has been given.

The key features 3. and 5. are interesting for us at the moment because these are tested in our Firewall Challenge project too. To answer the question of our visitor, we installed the latest version of Rising Firewall. It should be noted that there were some differences between our configuration and the configuration of the tested machine of West Coast Labs. Firstly, the certification test was made some time ago, so the version of Rising Firewall tested was 20.54.41. We installed the latest version available today, which was 20.66.40. Also the Checkmark test was done on Windows Vista Business Edition while we used Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3. Neither of these differences should affect the results because according to Rising website, their product fully supports Windows XP too and the new version should be at least as good as the older one.

To review the claimed protection we used some tests of our Security Software Testing Suite (SSTS), which is used in Firewall Challenge. According to the press release, Rising should be able to prevent misusing the COM interface of Internet Explorer components. This is exactly what Flank test is about. Then it should be able to prevent DLL injection in order to pass the Module Test – this is exactly what FireHole test is about. And according to the description of the certification, it should implement an effective protection in order to prevent unauthorized local applications from accessing the local network – this is what many leak-tests are about, we used AWFT1 and CopyCat just to verify the protection is implemented.

Rising Firewall passed FireHole test smoothly. A popup window appeared asking about an unknown module that FireHole injected to Internet Explorer's process. However, Rising Firewall failed Flank, AWFT1 and CopyCat tests. According to the press release, it should pass Flank at least. The reason why Rising failed Flank is simple. The protection implemented by Rising Firewall in order to intercept working with COM/OLE objects is based on user mode hooks, but the tests of SSTS are implemented to unhook the user mode hooks. It is well known fact that user mode hooks can not be used to implement security features safely because they can always be bypassed. Rising Firewall uses user mode hooks improperly and hence it does not work against Flank. When we run Flank with unhooking disabled, Rising was able to intercept its attack attempt. AWFT1 attempts to access the network indirectly – it injects its code into an instance of Internet Explorer that it creates. The injected code then access the network and returns the results to AWFT1 process, so that it seems that Internet Explorer accesses the network and not AWFT1. CopyCat also accesses the network indirectly but it uses another trick. It does not create a new instance of Internet Explorer but it injects its code directly to the existing Internet Explorer process. Note that any network-allowed process could be used by AWFT1 and CopyCat, not just Internet Explorer. Rising Firewall was not able to catch these attacks, which are well known for years and covered by many other software firewalls available on the market.

What do these results mean? The result of FireHole means that Rising passes the Module Test mentioned in the press release. Another test mentioned in the press release – IE Function Call Interception – was failed in our opinion, because the implementation using insecure user mode hooks does not really work since the attacker can choose whether to bypass the hooks or not. By certifying Rising Firewall, West Coast Labs said that it achieved an effective level of protection that prevents unauthorized local applications from accessing the local network, but the two basic tests we chose proved that this was not the case. This probably means that the methodology of West Coast Labs is incomplete in this part. SSTS is full of much more advanced tests that Rising Firewall does not pass either. From our point of view, Rising Firewall implements a basic protection that is partially based on unreliable user mode hooks and it is insufficient against the modern malware.

Firewall Challenge marked Rising Firewall as one of the worst products on the field because its protection is incomparable to the protection of its competitors such as Outpost Firewall Pro, Online Armor Personal Firewall, Comodo Firewall Pro, Privatefirewall, Kaspersky Internet Security, Netchina S3, ZoneAlarm Pro, PC Tools Firewall Plus and many many others. Giving you another point of view, you can now decide what Checkmark Desktop Firewall Certification means for a certified product and for you.

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