Multiple entries in firewall and usage with portable apps

GlassWire Help
1

Hello,
im using a external encrypted SSD (always mounted on the same drive letter). From there i start portable apps from portableapps.com. Every time i restart windows and start a portable app(any network connecting app) again, glaswire ask me again to allow the connection. In the firewall and usage tab the portable app has multiple entries.

Can you reproduce and fix this?

thanks

2

I think this may be expected behavior since each time the portable application is different than the previous one. You can mouse over the app name and click the “X” next to it to delete it manually, or it will automatically move to “Inactive app” in awhile.

3

but why would it be different? does it have a different hash or how does GW check that?

4

I don’t have much experience with portable apps. Let me ask the dev team and see if they have some ideas/comments. Could you give us some examples of several portable apps that do this for our testing? Thanks.

6

Ok, i did some more testing, it is the combination of portable Apps and encrypted! portable Samsung SSD. When i deactivate the software encryption at the Samsung SSD tool then there is no problem.
With encryption enabled you can test it with every portable App, for example Firefox Portable portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable

I know it is a very special case, but maybe the developers can look into it, because i really want to use a encrypted external ssd without the multiple entries in the firewall.

thanks

7

Please give us more details about how we can recreate this setup. We have no access to Samsung hardware currently.

8

You can use an encrypted hard drive with Windows BitLocker but only if it is compliant. @findechris, check this out:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/itpro/windows/keep-secure/encrypted-hard-drive

Warning: Self-Encrypting Hard Drives and Encrypted Hard Drives for Windows are not the same type of device. Encrypted Hard Drives for Windows require compliance for specific TCG protocols as well as IEEE 1667 compliance; Self-Encrypting Hard Drives do not have these requirements. It is mportant to confirm the device type is an Encrypted Hard Drive for Windows when planning for deployment.

9

Unfortunately i cant use BitLocker because i only have windows home. But i tried the software encryption software VeraCrypt and this is working without glaswire multiple entry problems.
It is still strange for me that i have multiple entries with the hardware encryption of the external Samsung T1 SSD, but for now its fine with the software encryption. Maybe when a developer get in touch with a Samsung T1 SSD he can explain it to me :wink:

thanks for your help

10

have to step in here, I think the encryption is secondary for this problem, the portable apps from portableapps.com and every other self contained portable exe (not installed in windows, only started) is not working with glasswire, that kinda sucks. perhaps I need a new topic…

1 Like
11

I can confirm similar behavior.

Everything works fine until I restart windows, then the connection is blocked and I have to remove the entries of portable apps. Once the “Do you allow it to connect?” dialogue is confirmed it will work just fine again.

How to reproduce the problem on any Windows PC:

  1. Set Glasswire to “Ask to connect”
  2. Download a portable app, e.g. “Kitty”
  3. Try to connect to some random IP, it doesn’t matter if that IP really exists
  4. Confirm that this app can connect to the internet
  5. Restart PC
  • At this point Glasswire will block the portable app and won’t ask if it can connect again
  1. Delete the portable app from the Glasswire whitelist
  2. Confirm (again) that the app can connect to the internet
  • The app will work until you restart your PC again

Its really annoying, other firewalls are not causing this problem. I’m not sure why Glasswire behaves like this because the binary name and file hash did not change after a restart.

Energy saving mode or a restart of the portable app won’t cause any problem.

I’m able to reproduce this problem on various pc and laptop configurations.

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12

@crogge

Thanks for the detailed report. We will test and try to recreate this.

13

Only discovered this in the last couple of days as I don’t usually run applications from a USB device. On this occasion, I was just doing some very long overdue maintenance! I don’t think the issue is particular to PortableApps[dot]com i.e. it affects any software being run from a USB device. My initial workaround was to temporarily toggle From “Ask To Connect” to “Click To Block” before running the USB app (e.g. PortableApps[dot]com Updater) but the ‘delete from whitelist’ is a more secure workaround so thanks for that.

1 Like
14

@ottchris

Thanks for your report. We’ll try to do some more testing with our major update as a portable app.

1 Like