[ale] Encrypted filesystem on netbook

Sean McNealy sean.mcnealy at gmail.com
Wed Nov 25 13:59:38 EST 2009


Are there enough people out there that would take apart your USB key
and try to pull the data off the flash chips directly that encryption
really helps here?  You could do simple password authorization in the
hardware (with a lockout on missed attempts) that would accomplish
pretty much the same thing without the AES256 encryption (and the
read/write throughput hit that requires).

-Sean

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 12:00 PM, Greg Freemyer <greg.freemyer at gmail.com> wrote:
> Jim,
>
> We just brought in a Edge DiskGo Guardian thumb to test.  (testing
> just started hours ago.)
>
> http://www.edgetechcorp.com/usb-flash-drives/guardian-secure-flash-drive.asp
>
> About half the price of the IronKey.  ($100 / 16GB)
>
> We mostly care about Windows, so we are testing it there right now.
> Good performance for large files.  (40GB / hr write speed).   Horrible
> performance for small files.  (less than 2GB / hr write speed.)
>
> I don't know if it has Linux support at all, so it may be useless to you.
>
> Greg
>
> On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 10:00 AM, Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Ironkey is my hardware ideal. I'm looking at a way to replicate that
>> functionality so it can work with COTS usb drives.
>>
>> On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 7:26 AM, George Allen <glallen01 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> >> Jim Kinney wrote:
>>> >> The bit I don't have is how to set up the USB so a brute force attempt
>>> >> will cause a secure wipe.
>>>
>>> I missed the previous parts of this thread, but this is exactly what
>>> IRONKEY usb drives are setup to do in hardware:
>>> http://www.ironkey.com/
>>>
>>> After a certain number of failed PIN attempts, the drive erases the
>>> private keys, erases the data, and then tells the FGPGA containing the
>>> keys and encryption side to wipe itself basically. So it's a hardware
>>> self-destruct. They embed the whole think in metal and epoxy, and
>>> supposedly the self-destruct can be triggered by either failed PIN
>>> attempts - or physical tampering attempts - so that you can't even get
>>> the data with a j-tag.
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>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> --
>> James P. Kinney III
>> Actively in pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness
>>
>>
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>>
>
>
>
> --
> Greg Freemyer
> Head of EDD Tape Extraction and Processing team
> Litigation Triage Solutions Specialist
> http://www.linkedin.com/in/gregfreemyer
> Preservation and Forensic processing of Exchange Repositories White Paper -
> <http://www.norcrossgroup.com/forms/whitepapers/tng_whitepaper_fpe.html>
>
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