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Hardware Kingston's Super Secure USB Drive
Sven Olsen (Blog) - March 17, 2006 5:47 PM

9 comment(s) - last by lemonadesoda.. on Mar 19 at 8:05 PM

Kingston has introduced the industry's first fully secure USB drive meant for the enterprise environment

Kingston Technology Company, a leader in flash and RAM, introduces what it calls the first ever completely secure USB thumb drive called the DataTraveler Elite - Privacy Edition (DTE Privacy Edition). The drive features 128-bit hardware AES encryption which secures data as it is transferred to the USB drive.

As businesses continue to evolve, they are turning more and more to electronic methods of transferring and storing sensitive data. Because mobile data transferring and storage has become so popular, security features have never been more important than they are today.

One of the most significant security features aside from the hardware encryption is a lock-out feature which shuts down any access to the drive's contents if the password is incorrectly entered 25 times consecutively. This is extremely helpful against brute force type attacks hackers may use to gain access to the drive's contents.

The DTE Privacy Edition comes in 5 flavors between 256MB to 4GB in size and have a peak read transfer rate of up to 24MB/sec and a maximum write transfer rate of 14MB/sec.
The DataTraveler Elite line has both the Privacy Edition as well as the standard counterparts without any of the security features. The DTE Privacy Edition is now available at major online retailers around the same price as the standard version.

	MSRP, US Only
DTEP/256	$48
DTEP/512	$75
DTEP/1GB	$119
DTEP/2GB	$222
DTEP/4GB	$347

Additionally, Kingston provides a Co-logo service which allows larger organizations to print their logos or any other information on one side of the drive as either an added security measure to identify who the USB drive belongs to or for marketing purposes.

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more info...

By Souka on 3/17/2006 10:04:47 PM , Rating: 2

So they say, "shuts down any access to the drive's contents if the password is incorrectly entered 25 times consecutively"

What then? format the drive I guess?

RE: more info...

By Jedi2155 on 3/18/2006 6:44:00 AM , Rating: 3

Thats what i'm thinking.

Parent

RE: more info...

By NetDef on 3/19/2006 2:12:49 PM , Rating: 2

From page 3 of the whitepaper at http://www.kingston.com/flash/pdf_ files/dt_elite_w...

"After 25 consecutive invalid attempts, the DT Elite will lock out the privacy zone; the only option left at this point is to reformat the drive, thus losing all the encrypted data stored in the privacy zone."

Parent

RE: more info...

By lemonadesoda on 3/19/2006 8:05:11 PM , Rating: 2

I don't like that.

Hardware should "slow down" key entry attempts. Perhaps only allow one per minute after 10 mistakes.

Can you imagine a colleague at work, or mum/dad/brother/sister etc. tried to "hack" you drive and WHOOSH... you were locked out of your data forever!

No. Not a good idea. Hardware needs to critically slow down key entry after failed attempts, not destroy data. It could slow down to one entry per day if necessary. That would really cripple any brute force hacking. Unfortunately, this requires some kind of clock mechanism which the designers forgot to implement.

Parent

What happened to truth in advertising?

By ThisSpaceForRent on 3/17/2006 7:54:52 PM , Rating: 2

quote:
Kingston Technology Company, a leader in flash and RAM, introduces what it calls the first ever completely secure USB thumb drive

Hasn't history shown us that where there is a will there is a way? Not that I'm making fun of their efforts, I applaud them. This way when some idiot from my credit card company leaves his thumb drive in Starbucks, it won't cost me everything.