Image: Adrien Olichon & BleepingComputer

Cybersecurity firm Sophos announced today that it has open-sourced the Sandboxie Windows sandbox-based isolation utility 15 years after it was released.

"We are thrilled to give the code to the community," Sophos Director of Product Marketing Seth Geftic said.

"The Sandboxie tool has been built on many years of highly-skilled developer work and is an example of how to integrate with Windows at a very low level,"

"The Sandboxie user base represents some of the most passionate, forward-thinking, and knowledgeable members of the security community, and we hope this announcement will spawn a fresh wave of ideas and use cases."

Sandboxie and its source code can now be downloaded from the official website available at https://www.sandboxie.com/.

From IE sandbox to universal Windows sandboxing tool

Sandboxie was initially developed by Ronen Tzur and released on June 26, 2004, as a simple utility to help run Internet Explorer within a secure and isolated sandbox environment.

Later, Tzur upgraded Sandboxie to also support sandboxing any other Windows applications that required a secure virtual sandbox for while running.

Invincea acquired Sandboxie from Tzur in December 2013 and the app eventually moved under Sophos' software umbrella after the cybersecurity firm announced Invincea's acquisition in February 2017.

Windows Explorer running in a secure sandbox

First free, now open-source

Sophos previously announced that it planned to transition Sandboxie into an open-source tool after switching it to a completely free license in September 2019.

"Sandboxie has never been a significant component of Sophos’ business, and we have been exploring options for its future for a while," Geftic said at the time.

"Frankly, the easiest and least costly decision for Sophos would have been to simply end of life Sandboxie. However, we love the technology too much to see it fade away. More importantly, we love the Sandboxie community too much to do that.

"The Sandboxie user base represents some of the most passionate, forward-thinking, and knowledgeable members of the security community and we didn’t want to let you down."