Usability and Security of Personal Firewalls

Effective security of a personal firewall depends on (1) the rule granularity and the implementation of the rule enforcement and (2) the correctness and granularity of user decisions at the time of an alert. A misconfigured or loosely configured firewall may be more dangerous than no firewall at all because of the user’s false sense of security. This study assesses effective security of 13 personal firewalls by comparing possible granularity of rules as well as the usability of rule set-up and its influence on security.

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