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General Discussion

General discussions of portable apps and news.

Disk Encryption without Admin rights - Does it exist?

Submitted by derekthegeek on September 6, 2006 - 4:09pm

Has anyone found a program that will encrypt/decrypt a USB disk that does not require admin privileges? TrueCrypt looks like a great program but I really need to be able to use my USB flash drive from public machines where I can be guaranteed of NOT having admin permissions. I don't want to carry around my drive without it being encrypted as I am sure I will lose it at some point. Has anyone come up with any workarounds, whether they be for TrueCrypt or another encryption program? Thanks.

- Derek

How secure? Biometric & TrueCrypt Questions

Submitted by derekthegeek on September 6, 2006 - 11:16am

Does anyone have any experience with any of the biometric (i.g. fingerprint scan) USB flash drives such as the "San Disk Cruzer Profile" and "Lexar JumpDrive TouchGaurd"? How well do they prevent access to the drive if a user is not authenticated? Is the U3 "Logon" security reliable or can it be bypassed without much effort? I would like to carry my USB flash drive around on my key chain knowing that if it is lost or stolen that my information will be secure from most everybody, save the NSA or FBI (I assume they could crack most anything).

I know others have mentioned using TrueCrypt to encrypt volumes on the flash drive, but does TrueCrypt, having to have "admin rights", cause any problems when using machines where admin access is not possible (e.g. library terminals, internet cafes, etc...).

thumb drive lifetime?

Submitted by jsbenson on September 5, 2006 - 12:46am

Since the lifetime of the NAND flash memory is quoted as between 10K and 100K write cycles, and I see the little LED flashing even when I'm not aware of doing anything to cause thumb drive access, the question naturally arises:

How long are these drives expected to last before the first bits start failing?

I know that I'm supposed to do backups regardless of the storage medium, but this is my first time out with a flash drive so I'm rather curious.

Also,

In a modern flash drive, does the flash memory controller remap storage addresses to equalize the write activity across the drive?

portable apps and data traces...

Submitted by jsbenson on September 4, 2006 - 7:56pm

...where data traces means "stuff left behind in buffers, the paging file, on disk or anywhere except your thumb drive or other removable media."

I have a TrueCrypted 2gb thumb drive with the PortableApps suite installed. I find myself automatically using Windows Notepad to edit stuff I like to think of as secured on my thumb drive. I have no idea what (if any) mechanisms Notepad has to avoid leaving data traces on the host system, wherever that may be, so I googled and found Steganos LockNote.

LockNote looks pretty good, it comes from a SourceForge project and so I'm assuming that it's fully Open Source which is a must for security software in my opinion.

Ventrilo

Submitted by MkA on September 1, 2006 - 2:19am

Does anyone know if the Venrilo versions 2.1.4 and 2.3.0 can work as portables, i haven´t been able to try it out myself cuz i don´t have a portable usb yet, have orderd one.

The thing i know about these .exe files is that you don´t have to install then, if you have winrar you can easily extract them from the .exe file.

If anyone have tried this or can try for me it would be sweet so i know it works.

Thanks!

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