Ariad is a small tool to prevent inserted USB sticks from executing code. Ariad started as a tool to prevent inserted USB sticks from executing code. Technically, it achieves this goal with a minifilter driver by blocking access to \autorun.inf on USB sticks. When you try to access autorun.inf on USB sticks, you'll get an access denied error. Hence the name Ariad (AutoRun.Inf Access Denied).

But Ariad has evolved and now restricts access to several file types on different media types (not only USB sticks).

Ariad's many idiosyncrasies stem from the design process. In stead of defining a feature set for this tool, I explored the technical possibilities of minifilter drivers and let the features emerge from it.

Ariad is a minifilter driver, and as such, operates inside the Windows Kernel. Bugs in kernel software can have grave consequences: the dreaded BSOD. So please test this software first on a test machine you can miss.

Ariad identifies 4 types of drives:
1. USB Drive (these are USB sticks, not external USB harddisks)
2. CDROM (DVDs too of course)
3. Harddisk (build-in harddisks and external USB harddisks)
4. Network (shares mounted as network drives)

For each of these 4 drive types, you can define up to 5 filtering options:
- no autorun.inf: denies all access to \autorun.inf (that's in the root directory of the disk, not in subdirectories)
- no executables: denies all access to executables identified by their file extension.

The license of this software is Freeware, you can free download and free use this system utility software.