enable in & out connections for application with dynamically changing path (wildcard support for firewall rules)

[W_K 1]

Hello everybody,

as the topic title says I have the following problem:

I use Opera as my main browser and have the firewall set to interactive mode (which I won't change)
Unfortunately, Opera changes the path containing the executable dynamically with every update.

example folder structure:
c:\Program Files\Opera\65.0.3467.72\opera.exe
c:\Program Files\Opera\65.0.3467.72\opera_autoupdate.exe
c:\Program Files\Opera\65.0.3467.72\opera_crashreporter.exe
c:\Program Files\Opera\65.0.3467.78\opera.exe
c:\Program Files\Opera\65.0.3467.78\opera_autoupdate.exe
c:\Program Files\Opera\65.0.3467.78\opera_crashreporter.exe

Now I have to allow connections every time Opera is updated.

I thought of using something like c:\Program Files\Opera\*\opera.exe, but that doesn't work with firewall rules.

 

Any ideas or solutions?

Many thanks in advance

[peteyt 393]

17 minutes ago, W_K said:

Hello everybody,

as the topic title says I have the following problem:

I use Opera as my main browser and have the firewall set to interactive mode (which I won't change)
Unfortunately, Opera changes the path containing the executable dynamically with every update.

example folder structure:
c:\Program Files\Opera\65.0.3467.72\opera.exe
c:\Program Files\Opera\65.0.3467.72\opera_autoupdate.exe
c:\Program Files\Opera\65.0.3467.72\opera_crashreporter.exe
c:\Program Files\Opera\65.0.3467.78\opera.exe
c:\Program Files\Opera\65.0.3467.78\opera_autoupdate.exe
c:\Program Files\Opera\65.0.3467.78\opera_crashreporter.exe

Now I have to allow connections every time Opera is updated.

I thought of using something like c:\Program Files\Opera\*\opera.exe, but that doesn't work with firewall rules.

 

Any ideas or solutions?

Many thanks in advance

Sadly wildcard support is unavailable and from what I can gather (apologises to eset if I'm wrong), there is no current plans to implement it. It is something that has been asked quite a few times. For example a lot of Windows apps from Microsoft e.g. on Windows 10 from the store, do the same thing, having the folder name change e.g. to represent the new version.

[ThomasH 0]

If there's something that's causing inconvenience with the ESET products, it's exactly this missing feature. It's really not the smartest approach to having to create new firewall rules each time the folder name is changed due to some app update process placing the executables in new folders (usually having the version numbers in them) which results in hundreds of entries in the ESET firewall ruleset in the long run. There are tons of examples for that (e.g. Office ClickToRun, Windows Store Apps) and the ESET products should be "modernized" to better handle this new development of the Windows environment.

[vvkjndl 0]

I am running into the similar problem. When I was searching for ESET Firewall wildcard support, I landed on this thread.

I hope that this request gets escalated.

[itman 1,659]

@Marcos has anyone from the Eset side explored whether using "/?/" in a firewall rule path specification would work?

I mention this because I noticed some Win 10 registry entries using this path specification. Appears to be something Windows natively supports; at least for Win 10.

Edited November 28, 2020 by itman