Pocket-sized SurfEasy defeats online spies, corporate or otherwise

By CHAD SAPIEHA on theglobeandmail

When I sit down at one of the public computers made available to journalists at consumer tech conferences it’s not without a bit of trepidation. How secure is the network? What’s happening to all of those usernames and passwords I’m entering to get at my mail, social networks and web-based work tools? Who might be snooping at my browsing activity?

SurfEasy, a Toronto-based startup, hopes to alleviate these worries with its first product, a small USB key that creates a personal, highly secure tunnel to the Web from any Windows or Mac computer on a public network.

The key isn’t much bigger than an SD card. It’s stored inside a compartment in a credit-card shaped holder. File it away in your wallet and you’ll always have it with you should you suddenly have need to hop online using a strange machine.

Plug it in and you’ll be prompted to enter a password that will launch a simple Mozilla browser that runs off the key. All data transmitted by the browser is protected with secure socket layer (SSL) encryption – the same flavour of security used by banks, SurfEasy is eager to point out – before heading on to the company’s private network, which removes your IP address for additional security.

Everything you do in this browser is protected from exposure to the public network, which sees only an encrypted connection and bandwidth usage. Plus, information collected by the browser – usernames and passwords, browsing history, form data – stays on the key, not the host computer.