A two-way firewall for Vista

Microsoft is readying a new, highly configurable firewall for its upcoming Windows Vista operating system that is designed to give system administrators much greater control over which applications are allowed to run on the systems they manage.

After a little more than one month of testing by Microsoft’s Community Technology Preview (CTP) users, the new firewall is now “very much on track” to be in the final Vista release late this year, and the company is thinking about adding a similar feature for its consumer users, said Austin Wilson, a director in Microsoft’s Windows Client group.

The new firewall is called “two-way” because it filters both incoming and outgoing network traffic, meaning that it can be used to block machines that are trying to connect to a Vista PC as well as applications on the PC that are trying to connect to other systems on the network.

Blocking outgoing traffic in this manner will give powerful options to Vista administrators, Wilson said. Using the firewall, administrators could, for example, ensure that their PCs use only a preferred instant messaging application. “If you tried a different instant messaging application, then it would be blocked,” he said. “It’s really something that we’re targeting toward enterprise administrators in corporations.”