Patent ID: 7873656

Claim:
A gateway appliance for use in an arrangement for evaluating a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) request, said gateway appliance including at least a kernel space and an application space during operation, said gateway appliance comprising: one or more drivers residing within said kernel space of said gateway appliance and configured to perform at least intercepting said URL request, said URL request being initiated by a client device and being addressed to a server device, said gateway appliance being a computing device coupled between said client device and said server device, said gateway appliance being external to said client device and being external to said server device, and querying at least an information service to obtain information attributed to a URL that is associated with said URL request, wherein said information service includes at least an Internet-based service capable of providing said information attributed to said URL and a local data store configured to cache said information attributed to said URL, said querying first queries said local data store, and if a cache miss is experienced, at least a portion of said URL is passed to said internet-based service to obtain said information attributed to said URL and wherein said one or more drivers are configured to pass said URL request through said gateway appliance without utilizing said application space to evaluate said URL request if said URL request is deemed safe from said information attributed to said URL, thus enabling a connection to a webpage represented by said URL; and a computer readable medium, wherein said one more drivers are stored in said computer readable medium.