Flash drives are generally the bane of security officers the world over. It's terribly easy to copy sensitive information onto them and they're very easy to lose.
There have been a number of high-profile security breaches of organisations that should know better when it comes to flash drives full of customer data, logins and passwords and compromising details. What can be done?
Enter the Kingston D6000, a secure flash drive with drivers for both Windows and OSX operating systems that has a number of security features built-in.
Firstly, it conforms to the US government FIPS 140-2 level 3 standard for secure hardware and software, which means it's good enough for the Feds to store sensitive but unclassified information.
This standard is comprehensive (you can check out its page on Wikipedia here) and the D6000 comes in at level 3 because it includes a tamperproof case and identity-based authentication.
In summary:
Good: Easy to use, secure
Bad: A bit expensive
Overall rating: 9/10
Dimensions: 77.9 x 22 x 12.05mm
Operating temperature: 0^0C to 60^0C
Storage temperature: -20^0C to 85^0C
Minimum system requirements: USB 2.0 compliant and 1.1 compatible, two free consecutive drive letters required for use
Price: 2GB at R717, 4GB at R894, 8GB at R1 100 or the 16GB at R1 922
This is password-based: when you plug in the drive for the first time, it mounts a read-only partition with the driver utility. Run that, choose a password (good password strength is enforced) and the data partition will be enabled after which you can use it. The password is not stored on the device itself and the master key is recreated at login time.
Otherwise, it's just a flash drive and that's the point: no frills and no complexity to using it (apart from remembering the password). Just plug it in and go. It doesn't allow sharing or multiple users and if you get the password wrong after 10 attempts, it will zero the data partition.
Read and write is a very respectable 10Mbps and 5Mbps, respectively, which is more than usable considering every byte written to it is AES-256 encrypted. Kingston says the unit is water-resistant, but I didn't feel up to testing this.
For organisations struggling with enforcing a no-flash, no-copying policy across their desktop fleet, this might just be the simple and secure answer.
Share
