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7 Secure USB Drives Reviewed
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Mar 03, 2008 11:48 AM
from the i-feel-safer-already dept.
from the i-feel-safer-already dept.
jcatcw writes "Computerworld has reviewed seven USB drives that use either encryption or a physical keypad to protect stored data, and found big differences in I/O speeds, ease of use and strength of security. In the case of the drive using a key pad, the editors were able to break open the device and access the data, bypassing the PIN security. They also state that there is little difference between 128-bit and 256-bit AES encryption because neither has been broken yet. The drives reviewed were the SanDisk Cruzer, the Lexar JumpDrive, the Kingston DataTraveler, the Imation Pivot Plus, the Corsair Survivor, the Corsair Padlock and the IronKey Secure USB Drive. The editors chose the IronKey as the most secure."
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For the... (Score:5, Informative)
We dont want to see a little bit of content over 9 pages!
Truecrypt: Linux, OS X, and Windows. Free. (Score:5, Informative)
"Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux"
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All trust the OS, except... Root only to install. (Score:3, Insightful)
All drives except those with separate keypads trust the OS with the password. Hardware keyloggers will see the password if there is no separate keypad. But that's not the problem. The problem is losing the drive. Hopefully the drive would not be lost in the same place someone is using a key logging device.
Root is required only to install TrueCrypt, not run it.
Re:All trust the OS, except... Root only to instal (Score:2, Insightful)
What if you want to read the data on a computer that doesn't have TrueCrypt installed?
Re:All trust the OS, except... Root only to instal (Score:4, Insightful)
But I'd be wary using a secure key on any public PC... you can't trust the PC, and the key could easily be compromised if the machine is. The chain of security is only as strong as it's weakest link.
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Format a Flash drive as NTFS (Score:2)
I wonder if that would make the flash drive more reliable, since NTFS is more reliable than FAT?
Don't use Windows OS encryption. According to Microsoft technical support, it is not reliable.
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NTFS encryption tied to OS user name and password! (Score:3, Informative)
That means if the user account is damaged, the data is lost forever, unless the user info can be restored from a domain server.
There are complaints on MS user groups from people who have lost months of hard wok that way.
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Unless people can tell me reasons otherwise.
Re:Truecrypt: Linux, OS X, and Windows. Free. (Score:5, Funny)
Indeed, our thumb drives utilize gold connectors to ensure the fidelity and privacy of your porn collection. Other thumb drives use cheap, base metals. These are highly susceptible to corruption and thus are insecure. Don't take the risk and go cheap; after all, do you really want the whole world to see your midget clown photo sets?
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Solution: (Score:2)
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See this encrypted usb HARD drive:
http://www.heise-online.co.uk/security/Enclosed-but-not-encrypted--/features/110136/0 [heise-online.co.uk]
Some 128 bit encryption was involved, but not implemented a correct way, so it was easy to decrypt beacuse only a xor key was involved.
TrueCrypt (Score:5, Insightful)
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Corsair already does on some of their drives (like the Flash Voyager 32Gb)
Short summary (Score:5, Informative)
The Corsair Survivor - no security, so TrueCrypt is needed, but setup instructions for TrueCrypt are included.
The Imation Pivot Plus Flash Drive - uses AES-256, but in the insecure ECB mode. Hey, I suppose it's better than ROT13 at least.
The IronKey Secure Flash Drive - "To use the IronKey flash drive, you need to activate an online account." Well, that sounds like a great idea.
The Kingston DataTraveler Secure -- Privacy Edition - "Kingston refused to say what encryption mode the device runs in, citing that it was proprietary information." So that would be ECB again, then. Or maybe something even more pathetic.
The Lexar JumpDrive Secure II Plus - Special proprietary software is required to use this one.
The SanDisk Cruzer Professional - ECB again.
Really short summary: buy a conventional USB stick and do the encryption yourself using free software that you can trust. Because customers cannot tell the difference between a well secured device and some snake oil junk, there is no incentive to make these things work properly.
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The anonymous browsing works well. I haven't had as much luck with the password-keeper feature. Note that so far only basic file access works on OSX, but it works easily.
I opted for the online activation, and used the password recovery successfully - and am glad I got to test that inste
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The Ironkey sounds really good, but since I need to swap between a Windows and a BSD pc, it's effectively useless.
With TrueCrypt you could make it work cross-platform, but you'd need non-Windows host computers to have TrueCrypt already installed.
Yeah I glanced these over... (Score:5, Funny)
My condolences... (Score:3, Funny)
...on the loss of your mother, when she happened to pull your USB drive out of one of your pockets before she threw your jeans in the wash.
Easy but inconvenient. (Score:2)
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Plus you could use it as an emergency radioactive boat anchor in a pinch.
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That extra 273 degrees makes the critical difference between this approach and lesser celsius-based systems.
Another analysis (similiar vein) (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.flylogic.net/blog/ [flylogic.net]
They often de-cap the ICs and reverse engineer from a microscope. Really interesting stuff!
IronKey and OSX/Linux/etc (Score:2)
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It works wonderfully on the Mac for basic encryptio/decryption/file access, and I am also mounting it to a WinXP virtual image within VMWare Fusion. The VM XP thing works flawlessly, including auto-mounting, and I initialized the key on the VM prior to using it on the Mac.
The company promises Linux drivers soon.
Not yet- but do you care about your data tomorrow? (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe not yet, but presumably, when they are broken, they're likely to be broken in such a manner that 128-bit falls way before 256-bit. So if you only care about someone not stealing your data right now, they might both be equivalent, but if you're worried about someone stealing your data at any time and then reading it further down the road, one is likely to be much better than the other.
Also, I'm sure there will be some debate on this, but I'm not entirely convinced that if someone like the NSA has thrown a few billion dollars at the problem including having a custom-made super computer with their own unique, dedicated processors that are highly optimized for cracking encryption, that perhaps 128-bit AES is already compromised and we simply don't know. The relative advantages of 128 vs 256 bit might depend both on how long you want to keep your data secure, and on who you're trying to keep it secure from.
Big difference between 128- and 256-bit security (Score:2, Insightful)
With an algorithm like AES, if you need your data to stay secure longer, use a bigger key.
128 vs 256 Bit AES (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't matter that much that there's little difference right now between 128-bit and 256-bit AES. It will matter later. There will almost certainly be time after 128-bit AES is broken but before 256-bit is broken. During that time, the extra 128 bits will mean the difference between secure and insecure. And remember, attackers who can read but not crack your messages can still keep them for later when they're crackable. If your messages still have value at that time, they will crack them then.
Of course, even 256-bit AES will eventually be broken. Everything will eventually be broken. But you have to consider that what you're buying for your encryption dollar isn't secrecy, period, but rather secrecy for a period of time. 256-bit AES buys more time.
not as secure as it could be (Score:5, Interesting)
The vendor assured us it was properly secured, and I got first crack at it. We were quite disappointed.
I found that while each block on the hard drive WAS encrypted (by the firewire-to-ide bridge board), they were each encrypted using the same key, and no salt. This means that every block was encrypted in the same way.
This by itself probably seems harmless, but it reveals information that should not be revealed. Let me propose a scenario:
I engineer myself a position working at a rival company, and get physical access to their R&D lab, unsupervised. I have a 1/2 hr lunch break of time to find the drive containing the comany's secret recipes. I open the cabinet and find 30 of these secured drives. I was intending on taking the drive and copying it, but christ, there's 30 of them. I brought along a portable 1gb drive which would fit maybe 5 of them, but not 30.
So which ones do I copy? The bad news... I can tell which ones to copy.
I can look at the blocks on the disk and immediately spot any drives that have not been formatted, because their first 50 blocks are all going to contain the same random garbage in each block. OK that narrows it down to 8 drives. I can only image 5. So I look further.
I can now tell which drives are formatted FAT32, APS (apple HFS), etc. I can do this because I know what blocks are zeros (because there are a lot of them and they are all the same) and so I can tell which bytes in the other blocks are NOT zeros, and this makes determingin format AND used space trivial. I know the drive I'm looking for is FAT32, and that breaks it down to 3 drives. I could just go with the one drive that clearly has 30 gb used on it, and skip the others that appear very lightly used, but this has given me plenty of time so I happily image the 3 drives to my portable and sneak out in under 20 minutes.
Now of course we have to break the data, but the moral of the story here is, they allowed me way too much information from the supposedly secure drive, and it was enough to make what could have been a fruitless attempt into what may be a very successful attempt.
I brought this issue to the manufacturers, and was brushed off. They did not consider this a problem. riiiiight.
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I agree that salts should apply and keys should be different for every sector, like Truecrypt does. But secure drives should be fully overwritten before use, even then. If the cracker has access to your encrypted data over a period of time, you should al
FIPS 140-2 compliance? (Score:2)
Ironkey (Score:3, Insightful)
Seems pretty easy for someone to destroy the drive/data if they wanted to. Even accidentally destroy the drive/data.
Stupid garbage products (Score:4, Insightful)
One of them won't even tell you the full details of the algorithm they use, saying it's 'proprietary' which is another word for "It's secret and it doesn't actually work." in the security industry.
Not only that, but each and every single one of them uses software on my computer to do the encryption. I can get the same thing by using decent drive encryption software like dm-crypt and LUKS. And those are publicly viewable and peer reviewed so they're much more likely to be secure than some stupid random algorithm slapped together by a few techs they paid to do it out of the spare change jar. So that's just totally silly.
I was hoping for something where the encryption was really done in the drive itself and it required me to enter something on a little keypad attached to it in some way in order to decrypt anything. I bet the one that sounds like it might do that just causes the USB device to refuse to talk to the world unless you enter the right thing on the keypad. You could pull that thing apart, attach a few leads and I bet you could read every bit off there (including the PIN) in the clear.
Security isn't that hard to do right. But nobody seems to want to bother. They just want to slap the word on their product, make the user jump through a few hoops and call it good.
No BioStik review? (Score:4, Interesting)
Ahem, Iron Key reliability? (Score:3, Interesting)
What a surprise... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sure that's just pure coincidence, though.
Re:A false sense of security is actually worse (Score:5, Insightful)
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Their passwords may no longer be feasible to guess/crack, but if they are compromised in some other way - like snooping - you've guaranteed that they will stay permanently compromised.
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Honestly, I figured that this would be obvious, however I underestimated the pedantic nature of some people to pounce on the tiniest flaw in a post (most likely the mis-use of the word "permanent".)
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I've found a lot of Security Noobs do this, and
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Some admins are just working in larger environments where they can't sit down with hundreds or thousands of users and hold their hand and teach them nifty memorization tricks to help them remember their sufficiently complex password.
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Re:A false sense of security is actually worse (Score:4, Insightful)
It is not hard at all to say when discussing Windows systems. Passwords of less than 15 characters can be trivially cracked by OphCrack - no matter how complex they are, assuming the attacker has the appropriate rainbow tables. Passwords greater than that length cannot be cracked this way.
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Re:A false sense of security is actually worse (Score:4, Informative)
Thankfully this is set differently by default in both Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, so the LAN Manager hash is worthless. Of course, this doesn't mean that one can ignore physical security completely, but it raises the bar for password cracking.
To be safe, blincoln has the right idea -- minimum 15 characters, so even if the LAN Manager compatibility gets enabled for some $DEITY-forsaken reason, the passwords are immune to rainbow table cracking.
Long term, unless done already, MS needs to take a page from TrueCrypt's playbook [1], and perhaps offer the ability for passwords to be encoded with a varying number of rounds, (for example, SHA-512 hashing a password with a random salt, repeating a million times.) This will slow down brute forcing as an attack vector significantly.
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Re:Product development cycle (Score:5, Insightful)
Hint: 72693 transistor hardware AES implementation at one word of plaintext to one word of ciphertext per cycle runs much faster than 4978652193 transistor Pentium 4 decoding and executing an instruction set. Same with a dust-size ARM. Using a simple chip that does 1 round and has to be run 16 times might just get you 1MB/s at 4MHz. The chip can be simplified down to having a lookup table taking 4096 bytes of ROM to do 3 stages of a round, operating on 32-bit words in 4 stages; this will block the circuit doing that operation for 4 cycles though, so you could implement the circuit 4 times (4 lookup tables?) for 1MB/s at 1MHz. Also the final XOR would be 4 32-bit XORs or (better) just one 128-bit XOR.
With the 4xLookup optimization and the 128-bit XOR in a pipeline, this simple chip would do one AES block per 16 cycles. By duplicating the circuit and pipelining, you would do 2 rounds per clock. Get creative with it.
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