Hello everybody, this is my first post in this lovely site
I have the SanDisk's biometric flash drive, the "Cruzer Profile" (1GB) which seems to work pretty well under admin user in both the Windows 2000 (SP4) and XP SP2 PCs that I have at home.
However, I have many questions - I've searched the entire net to no avail, and even found one unanswered post in here, so if anyone can answer even a few, I'll be grateful:
1. The biometric validator pops-up automatically from a "local drive" which is a 2nd partition to the mass storage drive letter - seemingly, it's just like the U3 method to support autorun (which exists for the Profile too). However, the Profile is not really a U3-class device, and its autorun partition is read-only. Does anyone knows a way to re-format this partition and edit its autorun file?
2. How well does this drive perform under non-admin users? Does it still asks for validation automatically? Does it successfully render the data partition unreadable until the finger-print was confirmed? The same question holds for other operating system please (Mac OS/X, Linux/UNIX, etc...thanks)
3. How secure this validation method is? Is the protection method of the 2nd partition bypass-able? Of course it is, but by what means? (i.e. will a potential hacker need brute-forcing, or he could just lit a flag on the FAT...)
4. What happens if all my fingers get chopped-off? Now seriously - I couldn't find a "backup" password to access the protected partition - while I'll try to keep my hands intact, I'm more worried for the resistance of the biometric unit.
5. How well does the biometric unit behave underwater, if at all? With sirty hands? How does one is suppose to clean it if the need's be?
6. Seems like the validation holds for as long as the drive is hooked to the PC. Does anyone know a way to virtually "detach" it from the USB controller periodically in order have it ask for my fingerprints after some idle time? Preferably without involving some auto-restart cycle of the host PC...;)
7. Anyone knows of more, I guess 3rd-party, uses for the biometric identification method? Having it co-operate with encryption software could be nice...
Well, that's what I can think of for now - I'll really appreciate your responce!
Thank you,
- Yuval.