As Electronic Floppies

Secure Thumbdrives

Security software is used to protect data transported in thumbdrives, to provide a variety of encryption keys to encrypt corporate data on disks, and to store a list of internet passwords.

You can think of it as like a sophisticated key you plug into the ignition to give you specific access to various functions depending on which key you use. In a car, the analog would be a child’s key that lets them run the radio and DVD player only, or a valet’s key that lets them drive but not open the glove compartment or trunk.

Clever units, such as the Safe Net iKey 2032, implement PKCS #11 or cryptokey, an platform-independent scheme for hardware tokens. There is plenty of room in there for multiple keys. You could, for example, have different keys for different purposes or different keys for different times of day, days of the week, months, or years. They are like a more flexible dongle. Like ordinary thumbrives, then can contain private keys, however, unlike ordinary thumbdrives, they they protect them from being duplicated, even by the owner of the thumbkey. They keys cannot be extracted. They can only be used to digitally sign/encrypt/decrypt. So a thumbdrive can behave like a robust smart card. Like a smart card, they can have a pin.

The Ironkey is a high-end secure card that self destructs if it detects tampering. They have a James-Bondian Flash demo to explain the product.

There are thumbdrives with biometric finger print identification, with a builtin mini OS, AES encrypted data, These were specialty devices not long ago, but have become almost throw-away corporate gifts like pens. KCTS, the local PBS public TV station is giving away 1 GB thumbrives to people who make a pledge. usb007 makes models starting at $10.00 USD for 32 MB,$21.00 USD for 512 MB, $25.00 USD for 1 GB,$189.00 USD for 8 GB  Last revised 2007-05-07.. There are even jumbo thumbdrives holding 60 GB actually a miniature hard disk. Trek Thumbdrive make models with flash memory and hard drives and also a model especially for security keys. You could even use an iPod as a thumbdrive.

One project pending is to set up the Replicator with thumbdrive-controlled encryption. They could also be used to protect expensive software from being hacked by encrypting parts of it or the data decrypted with keys stored in the thumbdrive, or by putting part of the software itself in the thumbdrive.

Trek