Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

RSA: Self-Encrypting USB Hard Drives for all Operating Systems (Video)

Posted by Roblimo on from the the-mysteries-of-the-crypt-on-a-portable-hard-drive dept.

Tim Lord met Jay Kim at the RSA Conference in an Francisco. Kim's background is in manufacturing, but he's got an interest in security that has manifested itself in hardware with an emphasis on ease of use. His company, DataLocker, has come up with a fully cross-platform, driver independent portable system that mates a touch-pad input device with an AES-encrypted drive. It doesn't look much different from typical external USB drives, except for being a little beefier and bulkier than the current average, to account for both a touchpad and the additional electronics for performing encryption and decryption in hardware. Because authentication is done on the face of the drive itself, it can be used with any USB-equipped computer available to the user, and works fine as a bootable device, so you can -- for instance -- run a complete Linux system from it. (For that, though, you might want one of the smaller-capacity, solid-state versions of this drive, for speed.) Kim talked about the drive, and painted a rosy picture of what it's like to be a high-tech entrepreneur in Kansas.

3 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. Requires no drivers by tepples · · Score: 4, Informative

    I didn't watch the video, but I did read the transcript. It's a USB hard drive enclosure that handles all the password entry and encryption in the enclosure. It requires no specialized drivers at all, other than the ubiquitous class drivers for USB hard drives and USB CD drives.

    1. Re:Requires no drivers by tlhIngan · · Score: 5, Informative

      Yes, just like all the other products on the market including the ones I mentioned. No drivers needed. So what does this do that the others do not? I'm truly interested as I use these products and am always open to alternatives or better options.

      No, most of the other drives do not do that. Most are simply an HID device coupled with a hard drive. On some, you enter the code and the USB port gets activated (rip out the drive to bypass). Actually, an alarming number of these are this kind.

      On others, the drive is encrypted, and the keypad or fingerprint reader is used in conjunction with software running on the host PC to decrypt it.

      This one looks to do all the encryption and decryption on the device - enter the code to unlock, and it decrypts the drive. Rip the drive out and you can't bypass it as it's still encrypted. OS agnostic and everything.

    2. Re:Requires no drivers by Y-Crate · · Score: 3, Informative

      What do you use it for? If you are plugging secure data into an untrusted box it seems that you have no defense against something on the box simply reading all of the data. For example if Spotlight indexes the drive then it has leaked data immediately.

      Moving confidential footage in post production.

      It's not about untrusted boxes, it's about the untrusted sneakernet between two trusted boxes. I could spend all day uploading / downloading huge files from servers, or I could have an Apricorn drive couriered from one production facility to another in a fraction of the time.

      If someone intercepts it and rips the drive out of the enclosure - congrats to them - they have a bunch of useless encrypted data and useless plastic.

      If the end user is on a computer that indexes it, well, recording just the existence of the extraordinarily undescriptive file name made up of digits, letters and dashes won't hurt anybody or the company.

      If the end user actually copies the confidential files onto an insecure drive, then there would be a problem. But that's not remotely related to the method used to get the data to them.

      This is the sort of thing I take very seriously as data breaches = end of your TV / film career. You get blackballed instantly.