GottaBeSecure: Tiny Mobile Firewalls

Although most modern operating systems come with a built-in software firewall, sometimes it’s hard to know for sure whether the thing is turned-on and exactly how many holes (“exceptions”) you’ve opened up. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a hardware firewall small enough to put in your pocket? A company called Yoggie is selling two extremely small hardware firewalls that are perfect for mobile users:

Where could you use a tiny mobile firewall?  Here are a few ideas I had:

• On a hotel or other public broadband network
• At your “friendly” neighborhood LAN party
• While connected to a customer’s network (enable logging to record exactly what traffic you put on their network)
• Isolated yourself from your students during a hands-on computer training course (especially if it’s an “ethical hacking” course)

Being a fairly regular attendee of the Black Hat and DEFCON security conferences, I’d really like to plug into the conference networks with one of these devices and then see the built-in Snort intrusion detection system light-up!

Another nice feature of these tiny mobile firewalls is that they won’t impact the performance of your tablet PC or UMPC while providing their security services (a concern mentioned with regard to on-board encryption programs I wrote about last week).

Have any GBM readers tried out these devices? What did you use them for and how did you like them?