January 27th, 2006 in Lifehack, Technology

How to secure your USB thumbdrive

TrueCrypt is a free open source which allows you to encrypt your disk. This is really useful for securing your USB thumbdrive as you wouldn’t want your documents and datas exposed to third party when it got stolen or lost. Main features are:

Creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk.
Encrypts an entire hard disk partition or a device, such as USB flash drive.
Encryption is automatic, real-time (on-the-fly) and transparent.
Provides two levels of plausible deniability, in case an adversary forces you to reveal the password:
1) Hidden volume (steganography – more information may be found here).
2) No TrueCrypt volume can be identified (volumes cannot be distinguished from random data).
Encryption algorithms: AES-256, Blowfish (448-bit key), CAST5, Serpent, Triple DES, and Two fish.
Mode of operation: LRW (CBC supported as legacy).
Based on Encryption for the Masses (E4M) 2.02a, conceived in 1997.

If you need a tutorial on how it works, juand.ca has a pretty good tutorial on it.

Download TrueCrypt
How to secure your USB thumbdrive – A TrueCrypt tutorial

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Leon Ho

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Hans says on February 20th, 2006 at 11:31 pm
That’s nice, but the problem is that your USB-drive is mobile: you never know which system you will use it on next. And you MAY not have adminstrative rights. However, cool as it is, Truecrypt will not work without admin-rights.
So it’s back to the drawing board.
Annon says on March 12th, 2008 at 1:41 am
What about the ironkey. I think this is the perfect solution.
http://www.ironkey.com
Ronny Peleg says on October 28th, 2008 at 8:21 am
After exploring the secure USB drives market we started to use SanDisk’s enterprise solutions.
We got the Cruzer Enterprise which was particularly intended to meet the unique security, compliance which my organization is obligate to (a hospital).
I highly recommend it to any enterprise.
http://www.sandisk.com/enterprise
Ron Olevsky says on January 17th, 2009 at 9:10 pm
IronKey all the way! No admin rights, drivers to install, multi-OS support (Mac, Linux and Windows last time I checked), remote management functionality. These guys seem to understand security
Olivier Gordon says on January 18th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
Ron, you got be kidding us.
It looks like you are ONE of those guys…(who get paid by Ironkey)
Are you part of Ironkey’s web marketing team?
If I were you I would write “we” instead of “these” :-)
Too clear to miss it.
I hope IronKey understands more in security, because in marketing they defiantly need to improve.
Cheers
vik says on February 5th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
try using uHook Personal 2.0, its also good
frank says on February 6th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
We used uHook but, only the personal version is available. So, its not possible to have it on 100 or more machines, because there is no central control.
John says on May 16th, 2009 at 8:56 am
Software like Truecrypt did not work for us. Our hospital has started to hardware protect usb stick data. SafeStick from BlockMaster is the secure usb flash drive that was selected. Very good.
http://www.blockmastersecurity.com