VirtualiZatiOn is today the most common buzzword in the . market, and not without good reason. There are lots of differ¬ent ways of doing virtualization, and in this article we'll tell you about application virtualization. We'll use a utility called Sandboxie for the job. It allows you to run any application on your desktop in its own virtual environment. What this means is that it won't be able to harm therestof your machine. So even if the program crashes, or is a malicious one, it won't affect the rest of your system. This can be a boon for anybody, be it desktop users in an office, laptop users, or even home users. It just enhances your desktop security.

Sandboxie ensures that the application running inside the sand¬box never writes data directly to your hard disk (though, if required the application ii:an read data directly from your hard disk). As a result if a malware gets executed, it will only effect the virtual environment, which can be later discarded to protect your system. While browsing, Sandboxie downloads all files onto the sandbox. You can either recover these fJ.!es immediately or at the end of the session. You can even dis¬card them. Sandboxie could also be configured for monitoring appli¬cations, and issuing pop-up alerts if the monitored application gets executed outside the sandbox. It works only on Windows 2000, XP, Vista and Windows Server 2003.

Sandboxie. By default it is 'C:\Sandbox\ % USER % \ %SANDBOX%'. To change this go to the menu bar, select Sandbox >Set Container Folder option. From the popup window, choose the partition where you want to put the container and provide the complete path. Select Sandbox>Create New Sandbox option to create a new sandbox. In the popup window provide name for the new sandbox. The new sandbox will be visible on the main console of Sandboxie. To derme the respec¬tive settings of the sandbox that you just created, right-click on the sandbox and choose 'Sandbox Settings'. In the following window, go to Resource Access and define the resources that programs running in this sandbox must have access to. You can define which programs should have access to Internet, and to which files and folders program should have direct access or read only access etc.

To launch an application, right-click on the sandbox, go to the 'Run Sandboxed' option and select the 'From Start Menu' . In the float¬ing window, simply choose the application that you want to run in the sandbox. Now, you can use this application just like a regular appli¬cation without worrying about security of your system. You can even install applications inside sandbox and run them in a completely isolated environment.

We tested plenty of applications inside Sandboxie such as Firefox, IE, Thunderbird, P2P and 1M apps. It worked smoothly at all times, even when we simultaneously ran an application's virtualized thread as well as normal thread. We even downloaded a mal ware, installed it inside the sandbox and then discarded it after a couple of days. Later on when we ran the AV scan, we found no malware on the system.