SimWorks security

Our customer’s security and confidence in our products is a top priority for us.

Please find below all the steps we have taken to make sure that our company, the website, our data, and the software products we provide are fully secure. If you have any questions or concerns please do not hesitate to contact us and we will respond promptly.

IdealSimulations Ltd

IdealSimulations Ltd is a limited company incorporated in the UK. Our registered address is:

IdealSimulations Ltd

Registration number 12604231

71-75 Shelton Street

Covent Garden,

London

United Kingdom

WC2H 9JQ

You can also find the full company details in the ufficial UK government Company House Website.

IdealSimulations website security

We adhere to strict web security measures on our website using the services of web host Siteground, please find below a few of the most relevant website protections:

  • HTTPS protocol applied to the whole website
  • The servers to use the latest PHP 7 version with the latest security fixes
  • ModSecurity is installed on the servers and updates of security rules are updated weekly, protecting the website from the most common attacks
  • Use of sophisticated IDS/IPS systems which block malicious bots and attackers (Intrusion detection/prevention systems).
  • All the versions of all the software that is providing database services (FTP, SMTP, IMAP/POP3, HTTP, HTTPS) are up to date with the latest security patches
  • Apache in a chrooted environment with suExec

Also please find some info about the way we treat data in our privacy policy

SimWorks Code Signing Certificate

SimWorks is officially signed using an Extended Code Signing Certificate provided by a third-party company, GlobalSign, which is a trusted root authority CA (Certificate Authority). A Code Signing certificate is used to vet the software author and to guarantee that the code has not been altered or corrupted since it was signed and deployed. The process employs the use of a cryptographic hash to validate integrity and authenticity.

The public key used to authenticate the code signature is traceable back to GlobalSign.

To check the validity of the latest Code Signing Certificate, you can right click on the downloaded installer and select Digital Signatures, where you will find the current signature and you can then click on Details:

This will show the Digital Signature details. From here you can select View Certificate to inspect the Certificate issued with the code. You can also check that GlobalSign ensures that the software is coming from IdealSimulations Ltd and it has not been altered since its deployment. You can also enquire with GlobalSign directly in case of doubts.

Windows 10 warning messages

Despite the fact that the code is fully signed (see previous section) Windows 10 can occasionally show warning messages after the SimWorks download is completed. To continue use the software, click on “More info” in the first page and then on the “Run anyway” button:

Please refer to the Code Signing section above in case of doubts.

Antivirus warning messages

Depending on the specific Antivirus used by the user and on its settings, it may happen that our executables (e.g. SimWorks_installer.exe) can produce a false positive.

We use independent web services to test our software.

Check of Karsperky response https://opentip.kaspersky.com/ 

Kaspersky antivirus online check of the file SimWorks_installer.exe

We also test our executables on https://www.virustotal.com/gui/ to monitor the level of acceptance of antivirus software/platforms. From time to time, one antivirus can give false positive warnings. 

In the test below, the major antivirus platforms show that our executable is free from virus and malware.

Check a board of antivirus software at the same time https://www.virustotal.com/gui/

Main antivirust analysis results of the file SimWorks_installer.exe

From the same website you can also double check the validity of the Code Signing Certificate issued with the software

Code signing certificate validation using the third party website VirusTotal

Windows 10 Firewall warnings

On the first SimWorks startup and every time the user starts a new operation Windows 10 Firewall will show a Security Alert like the one below:

The user will get multiple messages like this. All the routines highlighted are open source third party software which SimWorks is using, those are completely safe and do not require actual access to the internet. We advise nevertheless the user to Allow access to get rid of those messages once the software is restarted.

How to solve the problem

If you have any questions you are more than welcome to contact us directly. Basically to solve the issue you have two solutions:

1) Install SimWorks manually, just follow our step by step guide on how to install SimWorks manually

2) Add the SimWorks installer as an exception to your AntiVirus, this is possible with most of the AntiVirus software we would advice to visit the website of your AntiVirus software vendor to see how to do it

Conclusions

We ensured to take all the steps to make our website and software products safe. Since we cannot guarantee that you will not receive a false positive or that there may be future threats to our systems we strongly encourage you to get in touch and contact us with any concerns or questions you may have.

Try our free CFD software SimWorks, no registration required or contact us to find out more