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7 Secure USB Drives Reviewed
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."
How are any of these better than using TrueCrypt in traveller mode? The only thing I can think of is that TrueCrypt requires administrator rights to use. And I suppose they may be easier to use for people who don't know much about computers or encryption. But I trust TrueCrypt a hell of a lot more than anything which comes preinstalled on these things.
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.
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make install -not war
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.
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It is hard to say what is better, a long password that has fewer obscure characters, or a shorter password that has a strict password quality policy.
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.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
TrueCrypt can put data into files, rather than using the whole drive. Put TrueCrypt on the drive as well as the file, and run it from there. So what if they know what program you encrypted it with, as long as you have a properly strong password, it won't matter.
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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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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