Hi there. Am looking for a drive protector for my USB drives.
I enjoyed Launchpad from U3, which is no longer available even for newer Sandisk drives. When you inserted it, it prompted you for a password. I have tried SecureAccess. Too difficult to set up and in my opinion, it's cumbersome to work with a vault, etc.
Is there anything similar to LaunchPad from U3 available in a generic form for ANY thumb drive? Would love to hear your suggestions. Thanks.
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Protection for USB Drive
June 15, 2011 - 4:55pm
#1
Protection for USB Drive
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there is not and will not be as this can not be done. There are solutions for specific usb sticks where the manufacturer inserts special firmware part into the controller of the stick.
try search function here and you will find many Q&A to this subject
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
Try a google search for IronKey but they aren't cheap.
Those things are priced up through the roof, which is right seeing as they are good at what they do.
You know what, I've been thinking. When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life TAKE THE LEMONS BACK! Get mad!! I don't want your lemons; what am I supposed to do with THESE!?
You can encrypt the whole USB drive and have the contents displayed as a mounted virtual drive. Once unmounted the contents are totally safe. I use it in conjunction with software I am working on. Truecrypt is Open Source.
Anyone that says something cannot be done should stand aside for the one who has done it.
Terry
Please search these forums for TrueCrypt. There are a lot of threads regarding this.
One of the biggest complaints is that you need admin rights to use TrueCrypt, and a lot of public/work/school computers do not give you admin rights.
Have you been able to run it on a computer with limited account privileges?
I made this half-pony, half-monkey monster to please you.
A lot depends on the organization. Our local library for instance does not have usb slots in the computers available to surf the internet.
Governments also tend to ban Usb's as a risk. I think it is mainly the home computer area as one is not likely to intentionally install viruses on their systems.
I use TrueCrypt and have Usb drives with all sorts of sensitive data on. Out of the machine and or unmounted it is save and protected.
I think that was what the thread was about.
Terry
then it has to be a hardware solution mandatory.
I know they might be home users, who operate their XP in admin mode and yes, then also TC will for out of the box for them. But what for then? Their own PC is such a IT security bomb that any further security measures are just waist of recourses.
There are many software 'solutions' but no of them is portable so of no real use except at home where you can go to admin mode and install the drivers first.
A solution like u3 is hardware connected, it is firmware based and this firmware is for a particular controller chip.
As Iron stick, this is also hardware based solution, reasonably designed firmware inside the controller will provide the security. But it can not be transfered to other stick.
I am using for example padlock2 from corsair, this uses asimple numerical key entry on a small keyboard on the stick itself, is also hardware solution independent of any operating system etc.
But for a password protection of a usb stick, it needs to be a portable solution, which means it will work at home, at work, in school, library, inzternet cafe, where ever and therefore with restricted user account, provided that there is any use of usb possible at all.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
Mostly right, but one flaw:
If you use Truecrypt at home, you don't need admin rights in day to day use. You just have to install Truecrypt locally with admin rights and can then use it with restricted rights. So, as I said, the solution depends on the usage and may work with truecrypt or FreeOTFE (see below). This is not generally portable but may fit to some peoples needs. We use such a setup at our school for some years now.
In addition to solanus' reply, you can find some solutions/setups with Truecrypt that may be useful for some special workflow. It depends on how and where you use your portable apps and sensible data. If you use them on many different host pcs in different enviroments, truecrpyt more often than not leaves you with a secure but unaccessible container.
If you only use your drive on some distinct pcs where you may have admin rights or can convince the IT staff to install truecrypt locally, it may be a perfect solution for your needs.
There are variations possible like two setups of portable apps where you only put sensible data and corresponding apps (email client/messenger/etc.) in the container (at the risk of not beeing able to access it somewhere) and leave a good part of the drive unencrypted as workdrive where security is not needed (or you could still pack some sensible data in encrypted 7z files). Thats my setup for years now, but I have (or can take over) admin rights on most of the host pcs I use daily. And I know that I only need the secured data on these computers.
An alternative to TrueCrypt is FreeOTFE which exists as development test in the forums. It has a similar approach as TrueCrypt but delivers an additional program (FreeOTFE Explorer) that can access the container without the need of a driver but is just a fallback solution as you have to extract files to use them i.e. comparable workflow as with 7zip or SecureAccess.
There is a link in this posting:
http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?s=&showtopic=24390&view=findpost&...
that may provide a utility for protecting your USB stick. If you try it please let us know your results.
Ed
providing security for some sticks exist, but not one for all sticks. I have tested also some, and found sticks with controllers which I could use utils and make them behave similar to former u3. However, it was only one stick in my collection which I was able to set up so, one very slow stick, so I did not bother with it any more. All other sticks had controllers from other manufacturers.
All others did work with software solutions like truecrypt and similar , but as this is basically not portable (needing drivers installation) it no solution at all.
And so it wass with all other software solutions so far. One needs somehhow to insert the password to it after all at least.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
There are much cheeper option than ironkey, I have 4gb Toshiba USB with built in password lock, got it around for $13(AU) but theres one problem, It only works using vista/7.
Who Dares,Wins - S.A.S
USB Write Protect by Naresh Manandhar. Namaste Bai.
http://www.nareshmdr.com.np/index.php?pg=mysoft_info&soft=usbwp
Ed
abt this here.
Did you check what it does?
(sets read only key in the registry for that device)
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
:-o I thought it set the flag on the USB stick itself. Sorry.
Where did you see that it writes to the Registry?
Ed
it works, someone proposed it earlier and we found then it works via reg key , so on one machine only.
Or imagine there would be such flag on the stick: how do you go to reset it? The stick is read only and can not accept any write to it...
Or the other way round, if you can set/reset such flag on a stick, why not everybody else?
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
Thanks for the explanation. I was thinking it worked like the old U3 approach which was all on the USB stick.
Ed
well on u3, there was a fake CD partition which did allow to have lot of extra code in it and most important, the controller in the sandisk sticks was specially prepared for such functionality, e.g handling the password traffic before anything else did work. So it was what they call in general hardware encryption.
Generic usb flash has nothing like that build in and so any attempts would have to be stored on the flash media itself.
Can be done, but if I can write some code to the flash, anybody and anything can do, so this would be no protection.
Long time ago, we had someone here who presented the same 'write' protection software. Well yes it does work, but only on the computer you set it.
So at home, you can set the stick write protected, there is a key dedicated to it in windows. If you take such stick to other computer, there is no write protection there.
Write protection on such flash devices can be well done by switching the write connection to the flash chips off. This is done so in sticks which have small switch included.
Unfortunately, those sticks with switch are very rare today, I have only one still but it is 128mb
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
don't think the development of this is very likely but...
What if there was a universal method of encrypting the drive with the operating system? Some standard method that would work on any computer with any operating system.
I know it's possible because Apple is about to release that capability in OS X Lion. The trick is making it standard.
"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein
My use of Google indicates that I am insane.
You don't need it to be USB-specific. Just a file system that supports encryption that is patent-free and then supported by all operating systems. Such a thing does not exist and is unlikely, primarily for commercial reasons.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
There's a CodySafe menu you can try: http://www.codysafe.com/codysafe/codysafe-protect-in-sketch.html
It won't work on some (most) USB drives, though. But if your lucky, yours might be an exception.
There's also this, but as you can see, it's still being developed.
As the 'Protect' feature doesn't work on any of the dozen and a half drives I've tried it on, I don't think this is even worth mentioning.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I asked them way back when, finally got a reply:
http://www.codyssey.com/forum/19-help-and-support/479-codysafe-protect.h...