Skip to main content Link Menu Expand (external link) Document Search Copy Copied

Unified Write Filter (UWF)

UWF is an optional Windows lockdown feature that helps protect drives by intercepting all writes to a drive (installs, changes) and redirecting them to a virtual overlay. After a system reboot, all changes are undone. This serves to protect the system.

UWF is often used for kiosk, hotel computers or systems that are to be secured against changes by their users. You can find more information about UWF here (external).

UWF Dashboard

This documentation is not about using the UWF, but the UI application UWF Dashboard.

The Windows UI application “UWF Dashboard” offers the possibility of a simplified activation/deactivation of an already configured UWF on a local or a remote domain computer.

Normally, one would use the console tool uwfmgr.exe to manage UWF but the UWF Dashboard can take over this task:

overview-uwfdb

no-more-console

Still under development…

But note that UWF Dashboard is still under development. At the moment, it only has the basic functionality to activate and deactivate the UWF. The configuration of the UWF environment on the target system must be done using either uwfmgr.exe or PowerShell.

Read next: Overview