Labs

There's no disputing the power available to the expert user in the Tiny Personal Firewall, which features a big and sprawling set of options that can protect you from just about anything, should you manage to tame it. But there lies the problem: only the real expert will be able to get the most out of it, and once you've got that kind of knowledge you tend to have moved on from the software firewalls to the hardware options (or have built your own appliance running one of the many free Linux firewall distributions).

Tiny suffers with interface problems that compound the complexity, with too many options on offer and not enough guidance to prevent the unwary from making costly errors. Don't expect usable sliders or buttons here. Instead, configuration and control is by way of individual rule input in one of the most confusing screens we've seen. Tabs and boxes everywhere

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make this unnecessarily hard work.

That said, it passed all our tests with flying colours with default settings, although as soon as any configuration becomes necessary we wouldn't trust it to remain so secure. Users are bombarded with warning boxes that require confirmations, but more often than not these refer to extremely obscure application components without the slightest hint of what the application actually is. Even an 'expert' would have trouble in making any decision other than a blanket blocking of all such dialogs.

On the positive side, this is a very capable application, offering several layers of protection. There's the traditional firewall, an intrusion-detection system that blocks traffic based upon packet content and an application security layer managing the behaviour of programs and related controls (such as 'can the application start itself?' and 'can it start other applications?'). Finally, there's file and system protection to guard against damage by trusted applications run by untrusted users.

Tiny can also lay claim to supporting a multi-user environment on Windows 2000 Pro/Server, XP and 2003 Server platforms, enabling two users to run IE at the same time but with different rules. Perhaps its most unique aspect, though, is the fact that it uses XML to enable seamless integration with existing remote management environments, the irony of which won't be lost on anyone who uses XML to make management of data easier.