Slashdot Mirror
Is the U3 Smart Drive Encryption Any Good?
Carlos asks: "I was searching encryption software for USB pen drives, and came across the U3 Smart Drive platform which offers portability and privacy through software and hardware. There are already several well-known hardware manufacturers offering U3 Smart Drives. Do they are really better than a plain USB drive plus encryption software such as TrueCrypt or it's just marketing hype?"
What's wrong with a simple dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX
While personally I feel this is the way to go (I would use dd_rescue, but that does not matter), it seems the level of insight needed to understand and do this simple and clear operation is not available to the general public.
It seems people do not want to do things that can be understood easily. They want to do things that look easy, i.e. click some button or run a programm that does a single, highly speciaalised operation and takes no parameters.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I've worked on a couple of commercial programs for U3. It works, but except for the cool graphics it's sort of a senior project-type thing: clunky, very buggy, very quirky and tricky to get right. In particular, avoid the Sandisk Cruzer: the vast majority of problems we've had (randomly refusing to mount, refusing to load software that other brands have no trouble with, and repeatedly corrupted files, both ours and theirs) came from that brand.
While I don't know of any U3-specific security problems, the combination of an immature proprietary platform, software hurriedly ported to it to grab market share, and USB-drive hackery by multiple makers to make it work practically guarantees they're there. From experience, it can take some pretty weird tricks to make a converted program work, and a lot of such "tricks" don't get tested as well as the original system was, either.