More Secure Flash Drives
One of the problems with solid state “flash” drives (also known as thumb drives) is that they’re generally insecure. Drop one on the floor in your local Starbucks, and anyone who finds it can read the data (unless you’ve encrypted files, that is). This is a very bad thing, especially if you happen to drop a drive containing sensitive data.
Happily, newer drives are being shipped with built-in encryption that could save users a lot of embarrassment — not to mention their identity and privacy. These drives use either firmware or software to provide (at least) user ID/password security on the stored data. They’ll also encrypt the data automatically, so only someone who knows the ID and password can read it.
IronKey and PocketSafe both offer what appears to be firmware-based security, while TrueCrypt (which we’ve talked about before) is a software package that allows users to encrypt data on any existing thumb drive. IronKey goes a bit further (as one might expect with a $149 street price): as the article notes, “if you enter the wrong password 10 times in a row the unit permanently deletes all of your data and is no longer usable. You can’t even reformat it. That’s tough love.” It’s also a great strategy, since it prevents brute-force password guessing.
These items aren’t cheap, especially in these days of 2GB thumb drives that cost between $10 and $20. What you’re paying for is extra protection, so your data won’t be compromised if the drive is lost or stolen. If you’re just transporting photos from one machine to another, you might not need the extra security (or maybe you do…it all depends on what the photos contain!). But the extra cost is cheap insurance if you use flash media to carry critical or sensitive data around.
Think of an unsecured flash drive as the electronic equivalent of a credit card, checkbook, or address book. That might provide the proper perspective.