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Yoggie claims that their Gatekeeper Pro is the world’s first miniature mobile security gatekeeper. While we’re not sure if that’s really the case, we were impressed by the size and quality of the unit. The big brother to the Pico Personal, the Gatekeeper Pro is essentially a computer that fits into the palm of your hand and provides a suite of security tools that range from Web filtering to spam/virus/phishing/spyware blockers, to web and email proxies, to SPI and Intrusion detection/prevention….

When we first heard about the Yoggie Pico Personal, we were a bit skeptical about its security benefits. After all, how much security could possibly be provided by a USB key? We figured that it would contain a few anti-virus, anti-spam programs and perhaps some shareware versions of system protection software.

Wow… were we wrong!….

The WAY that it boots is worthy of note. Not wanting to risk having the PICO be a target of infections and malware, Yoggie designed the PICO so that upon startup, it copies the Linux Kernel and applications from the READ-ONLY storage to the flash memory. That means that the PICO cannot be permanently compromised since it replaces the OS and applications each time it boots.

Once it has booted, the PICO establishes an encrypted SSL tunnel to Yoggie’s servers. Every hour the PICO will check for updated threat profiles and download them to the device. These profiles are used to update the 13 security programs including “Snort” for Intrusion Detection/Prevention, “Kaspersky” for Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware, “Mail Shell” for anti-spam and anti-phishing, and SurfControl for content filtering. It also provides Firewall, HTTP/FTP/SMTP/and POP3 Proxies in its suite of service.

The PICO User Interface is simple and easy-to-use. When you first log into the device, you are greeted with a screen that give you an “at-a-glace” status of risk level as well as firewall, intrusion and malware events.

The PICO provides very thorough reporting of system events. Every bit of data can be graphically represented in surprisingly eye-catching graphs or listed in text format for those who prefer to parse the data themselves. — Security geeks will find themselves leaving the UI window in a corner so that they can see the updating of threats and events. It’s quite hypnotizing in an uberGeek cool way!

Configuring the PICO personal can be as simple or difficult as the user desires. You can either use one of three preset policies or you can tweak the settings on your own using the advanced tab. If you choose to tweak the security settings, you have a dizzying array of options that you can play with. You can set policy for filtering, firewall, intrusion detection and prevention and any of the other PICO security suite components. You can also set maximum size of HTTP downloads or create a whitelist/blacklist of sites, ports and IP addresses.

The Support screen is remarkably uncluttered and yet refreshingly thorough in its hardware status reporting. It gives you all the data that you might need, from software revision to memory and CPU usage to hardware temperature.

In use, the YOGGIE software kept us from surfing to pages with dangerous or filtered content, warned us when we attempted to download files which were infected, and monitored all inbound AND outbound traffic for malware activity. The fact that it intercepts all traffic means that the PICO can equally protect Wi-Fi, wired, or WWAN network connections. From my observations, the PICO personal performed as well or better than any of the big-name security suites that I have evaluated over the last few years.

Performance wise… this is where the device REALLY shines. True to its promise, the PICO personal was able to accomplish all of its security magic without bogging down my system. Unlike many commercial security packages that seem to instantly incur a 50% performance penalty and often bog down my workstation for minutes at a time, the PICO never spiked above15% CPU usage, and I’m not entirely convinced that the spike was caused by the PICO rather than the programs that I was using to generate traffic.

With all the benefits listed, the PICO has one more, parenting and data security. The software can be setup so that access to the Internet is possible ONLY when the PICO is connected to the workstation. This is a powerful tool for parents who want to monitor the time that their children spend on the Internet or for professionals who want to ensure that their workstations are isolated while they are away.

The Gatekeeper Pro can operate in one of two modes. In USB mode, the Gatekeeper works in the same fashion as the PICO. A rubberized USB cable which is normally tucked away in the body of the Gatekeeper provides power and connection. All traffic is directed through the USB port and scrutinized for security problems.

In Inline mode, the Gatekeeper acts as a stand-alone security device. It still needs to be powered through the USB port or a 5 volt plug at the top of the unit, but when the Gatekeeper is inline, all traffic must first pass through the Gatekeeper before it can get to the computer — the best connected security model possible.

The Gatekeeper offers an almost identical services suite as the PICO personal. It runs all the same applications as the PICO Personal, but it also adds a VPN client. The great thing about this device is that mobile users can carry the Gatekeeper with them, plug it into any computer to which they might have access, and connect securely back to their home network. Combine this with the built-in Anti-Virus, Anti-Spam, IDS/IPS and threat detection engine, and you can pretty much secure any computer, any where, at any time, and log into the corporate resources without worrying about settings, configurations or possibly breaching the security of your network. This VPN client is most definitely worth the difference in price between the PICO personal and the Gatekeeper PRO.

Performance when using the USB mode was identical to that of the PICO personal — however, in Inline mode the Gatekeeper uses none of your system’s CPU power. It becomes transparent… with your computer not knowing, and not caring, that you are running through a security device.