How to secure your USB thumbdrive

January 27 by | 11 comments | Lifehack, Technology | Tags: ,

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:

TrueCrypt Screenshot
  • 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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  • http://www.hansdekker.com Hans

    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

    What about the ironkey. I think this is the perfect solution.

    http://www.ironkey.com

  • Ronny Peleg

    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

    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

    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

  • http://self vik

    try using uHook Personal 2.0, its also good

  • frank

    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

    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

  • Sonja

    Have heard bad news about some hardware encryption but that doesn’t relate to IronKey – this one stands apart from SanDisk and Kingston. But anyways, I’d like to say that free encryption utilities + simple USB key is not that bad. Why to overpay buying expensive hardware!? I used to use TrueCrypt but it gave me so issues on the guest PCs so now I’m using Rohos Mini – on-the-fly encryption even in traveler mode. Keep you data secure!