Faronics Deep Freeze What is it Deep Freeze

Faronic’s Deep. Freeze

What is it? • Deep. Freeze 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.

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

Disadvantages • Without the centralized control, it is very annoying to disable Deep. Freeze 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.

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

Confidentiality vs. Integrity • Deep. Freeze 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.

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 Deep. Freeze!!!!

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. ” - Wikipedia

Cont. • Deep. Freeze 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.

Final Notes • Deep. Freeze is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and SUSE Linux. • In order to bring up the Deep. Freeze console, a combination of Ctrl + Alt + Shift + F 6 is needed.

Bibliography • http: //www. faronics. com/en/Products/Deep. Freeze/D eep. Freeze. Corporate. aspx • http: //en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Deep_Freeze_(software) • http: //answers. yahoo. com/question/index? qid=20091 123023642 AAIIAwb • http: //www. faronics. com/Faronics/Documents/DFL_M anual. pdf