1. Faronic’s DeepFreeze

2. What is it? DeepFreeze is an application that “freezes” the hard drive of a system. Once a system is frozen, any change to data or the system itself does not actually take place. When the computer is restarted, the system goes back to the state when it was frozen.

3. Advantages Very useful tool for IT departments (Kent State uses this tool for public computers). No more imaging of drives if they are corrupted. Centralize control to push updates to computers

4. Disadvantages Without the centralized control, it is very annoying to disable DeepFreeze in order to modify files. User would have to thaw the machine, reboot, make changes, freeze the machine, and finally reboot. For home use, users would not go through the complete cycle in order to modify data.

5. Cont. If the system is booted from a different medium (USB device, network server), then it would not be protected.

6. Confidentiality vs. Integrity DeepFreeze does not modify data when the system is frozen. Therefore, the integrity of the data would remain at all times. Even though the integrity of the data remains, the confidentiality of it still depends on the OS. Malicious users can get confidential data, even if the system is frozen.

7. Tamperproof When a system is frozen, any change to data does not actually take place. On a reboot, the original state of the system (when it was first frozen) is brought back. Windows can be tamperproof with DeepFreeze!!!!

8. How does it work? “Deep Freeze is a kernel-level driver that protects hard drive integrity by redirecting information being written to the hard drive or partition, leaving the original data intact. This redirected information is no longer referenced once the computer is restarted, thus restoring the system to its original state at the disk sector level.” - Wikipediakerneldriverhard drive partitiondisk sector

9. Cont. DeepFreeze is proprietary software, so the exact way it works is not disclosed. The internet community believes: - A virtual drive is created where all changes take place. - A file on the system is created. - Everything is put on memory.

10. Final Notes DeepFreeze is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and SUSE Linux. In order to bring up the DeepFreeze console, a combination of Ctrl + Alt + Shift + F6 is needed.

11. Bibliography http://www.faronics.com/en/Products/DeepFreeze/De epFreezeCorporate.aspx http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Freeze_(software) http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20091 123023642AAIIAwb http://www.faronics.com/Faronics/Documents/DFL_M anual.pdf