Little Snitch is a
host-based application firewall for
macOS
macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...
. It can be used to monitor applications, preventing or permitting them to connect to attached networks through advanced rules. It is produced and maintained by the Austrian firm Objective Development Software GmbH.
Unlike a
stateful firewall
In computing, a stateful firewall is a network-based firewall that individually tracks sessions of network connections traversing it. Stateful packet inspection, also referred to as dynamic packet filtering, is a security feature often used in ...
, which is designed primarily to protect a system from external attacks by restricting inbound traffic, Little Snitch is designed to protect privacy by limiting outbound traffic. Until Little Snitch 4, it controlled network traffic by registering kernel extensions through the standard
application programming interface (API) provided by Apple, but at version 5 it switched to using Apple's Network Extensions due to the deprecation of kernel extensions on
macOS Catalina
macOS Catalina (version 10.15) is the sixteenth major release of macOS, Apple Inc.'s desktop operating system for Macintosh computers. It is the successor to macOS Mojave and was announced at WWDC 2019 on June 3, 2019 and released to the publ ...
.
When an application or process attempts to establish a network connection, Little Snitch presents a dialog that allows the user to deny or permit the connection once, for a limited time, or permanently. The dialog also allows the user to restrict the parameters of the connection, for example allowing a given application to only connect to a certain domain or using a specific protocol or port. Little Snitch's integral network monitor shows ongoing traffic in real time with domain names and traffic direction.
The application (version 4) received a positive 4.5/5 review from ''
Macworld''.
References
External links
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Firewall software
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