McAfee Personal Firewall is a rather odd product. First, you do not actually purchase it. Users purchase a one-year subscription from McAfee online services. The core technologies employed within MPF were actually developed by Signal9 Solutions. Signal9 is best known for their corporate and business level firewalls. One of the more successful Signal9 applications is Conseal PC Firewall. Conseal provides an effective level of protection, but its use of detailed and hard-to-configure rule-sets made it unpopular with most users. For brute force packet level filtering, Conseal is a powerful solution.
Does McAfee Personal Firewall have these same characteristics? Under close examination, the underlying firewall software is actually an updated version of Conseal PC Firewall. McAfee has replaced the graphical user interface of Conseal with a more efficient front-end. Also eliminated is the need for complex rule-sets. MPF's new interface also provides per application rights assignment. However, the new interface allows only minimal configurations, thus limiting the usefulness of the powerful Conseal firewall engine. For people interested in protecting only one system, MPF should prove more than adequate. For those with a system connected to a LAN, then MPF has limited functionality. The new interface does not allow specific port rights to be user defined. Another disturbing issue is that MPF does not close the NetBIOS Port 139 by default. The user can configure this option, but all Internet security packages should provide this simple option within the default configuration.
McAfee Personal Firewall's network logging is efficient, as it allows users to view applications, processes, services, and ports with current network activity. Another useful feature is that the generated log file is formatted as standard text. This means the log can easily be diagnosed and analyzed with a simple word processor.
Testing of MPF proved it to be a viable firewall once the advanced settings were optimized for maximum security. Numerous port scans and intrusion attempts were rejected and promptly logged by MPF. With a few updates to address the lack of specific port configurations and more user-defined settings, MPF could prove to be a valuable personal firewall solution. I am still puzzled by the one-year licensing strategy, but can see how this would force a person to update firewall technology at regular intervals. McAfee Personal Firewall could be a great package with a few fixes and updates. However, I honestly would not recommend it to most people seeking a personal firewall until these issues are corrected. Perhaps McAfee's next release will address these problems.
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