Review: Ironkey Secure USB Flash drive
When you first plug the Ironkey into the USB port on the PC it will want to go through a setup procedure, for setting up your passwords. It will also want to use the internet for updating as well. This initial process takes about twenty minutes. Not something to be done before a meeting.
From then on, every time the Ironkey is plugged into the USB port, it will ask for a password. This always on encryption method is pretty much like logging on to a computer to access your files, and about as painless.
More than a high speed Flash drive, the Ironkey features an especially hardened Firefox internet browser that is capable of secure sessions browsing. This is quite cool, for if you are surfing from a laptop in an internet caf%26eacute;, with just a click of an icon (very bottom right of the browser) will effortlessly and automatically set up an encrypted tunnel so no one else in the local area can see what you are doing.
We set up a little test and tried intercepting packets of data over an unprotected or open wireless connection. Once the secure session button was hit, all we could get was hash. I like that!
To have a tunnel in first place you must have two points, an entry point, which in this case is the Ironkeys Firefox browser and, an exit point out onto the Web. The exit point for Ironkey users are actually the Ironkey servers over in America - a service which is free to all Ironkey owners.
The only downside to this is that any website will think that you now live in America. But is that such a bad thing?
Though online encrypted surfing is great, it is still easy to block a tunnel from being created in the first place. Indeed some work places and even a few cyber cafes will block the use of encrypted tunnels, for their own reasons.
If this is the case your Iron key browser will let you know and you will have to turn off the secure browsing button, should you wish to continue surfing.
The Ironkey boasts a password manager. I was never a big fan of these in the past for obvious reasons of security. Though I do use the Ironkeys manager and it is very good. Again with the use of hardware encryption rather than software, I can find no trace of any password data at all.
Any password data must be buried very deep in its cryptographic chip indeed. One thing I didnt use much though is the random password generator. Its works well and is a good idea but, simply try to remember the password without your Ironkey, its really hard for me to remember a twelve character jumble of letters.
If that were not enough, they have included a way of backing up all the accessible data on the Ironkey to a PC. The backup is encrypted and though you cant read any documents, you can still see the name of all the files. It would be nice if the backup was a solid archive that couldnt be opened and examined like that.
All this software is on the Ironkey and requires no installation at all, and should updates occur in the future, the Ironkey has the ability to update itself over the internet.
For now though the Ironkey only works with Vista, and XP, though expect that to change shortly as their development teams are working on getting the Ironkey to interface with both Mac and Linux systems.
The Ironkey Secure Flash Drive is priced from $119 (for 1GB) to $409 (for 8GB) from www.acquire.co.nz
