Configuring TinyWall Firewall - Week 6

 Configuring TinyWall Firewall

On this weeks blog, we will go over the configuration of TinyWall. TinyWall is a lightweight firewall which is free and effective, it blocks most internet connections on download allowing you to set your preferences.

Once installed, we can click the "show hidden icons" tab to find TinyWall, once we click on it, the lightweight UI displays different management options, we can whitelist connections using different methods:

• Whitelist by executable
• Whitelist by process 
• Whitelist by window

Whitelist by process

On this topic we will cover: "Whitelist by process" as it is and easy way to recognise applications or services you would like to whitelist, showing you all the current active processes and connections. In this case we will select "Opera", once selected, you will be prompted with different configuration options.

We will configure the firewall to allow incoming/outgoing traffic to only port 80 and 443 (Http, Https) blocking incoming and outgoing traffic to all other ports. 

Once you have selected the addresses that you would like to whitelist, we can click on "Connections", where we can see all active connections, open ports, and blocked applications in the last 5 minutes. Making it easy to recognise unwanted addresses or services. 

If we click on the "Open ports" tab and select a process or service, in this case "Opera" we can see it has been effectively blocked from all ports that are not port 80 or 443.