Computers and Technology Articles

USB flash drives are common place in the work place and home and have almost become a necessity like the desktop . But, however handy these devices may be, they can also serve as a tremendous source of data leakage. USB flash drives have become as common as writable CD-ROM drives in most organizations. The problem is that some users have access to sensitive information, and want to have access to it no matter when or where they are. I can’t tell you how many people store sensitive information on USB flash drives. Information such as passwords, corporate secrets, and sensitive personal information just sitting on the USB flash devices is not secure.

And with the easy of use (plug and play) anyone can just plop the USB flash drive in and they can store about 16 GB as of January 2009 ish. 16 GB of data on a flash drive is insane! Image the amount of data one could leak with all that disk space! Disgruntled employee’s could copy data to the drive and sell it to a competitor, by the GB, LOL. How about thieves? They can steal the drive easy as 1,2,3 and no one will ever know who did it. Stealing it would be easy due to it’s size, think about it.

But don’t worry there are many ways to secure the data on a flash drive:

Password Protection

Encryption

Buried under a concrete slab

Password protection will stop the most elementary user from gaining access to your device. The data however is not fully protected and needs to be secured from more technically apt user. To secure the data from this type user we will use

Encryption, Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) symmetric encryption is an encryption standard adopted by the U.S. government. AES jumbles up the data and makes it’s virtually impossible for anyone to read the information on that disk.

Buried under a concrete slab would be one extra step… ha ha?

From my experience I recommend both the Lexar JumpDrive Secure USB Flash Drive and the Kingston DataTraveler. Both of these devices use AES and are simple to understand and use. USB Flash drive security can also be accomplished with free software available online.

If you have already invested in a jump drive you could encrypt it with TrueCrypt, free open source encryption software. TrueCrypt creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk. Provides two levels of plausible deniability, in case you’re forced you to reveal the password:

1) Hidden volume (steganography) and hidden operating system.

2) No TrueCrypt volume can be identified (volumes cannot be distinguished from random data).

TrueCrypt also user ASE 256 encryption.