Creeva’s World 2.0

I received an Iron Key unit to see eval­u­ate and see how it would inte­grate into our envi­ron­ment.   I can say I was skep­ti­cal and didn’t think it would have amounted to much, encrypted flash drive that we’ve all seen from a dozen ven­dors.   I was not too wor­ried about if there was an actual encryp­tion chip on the device as much as func­tion­al­ity.  I had expected this device to per­form as well as all the other devices in the same vein.  I was how­ever, pleas­antly surprised.

While I can say that for the most part this will work iden­ti­cally to other devices you may use that sup­port encryp­tion, the one thing that allows this to stand out is how it acts for user priv­i­leged access.  For a cus­tom desk­top setup we are work­ing on it would not allow a user to have admin­is­tra­tive access to the com­puter.  The lack of admin­is­tra­tive access caused the soft­ware that came with our stan­dard Lexar thumb­drives to not be able to work in encrypted soft­ware vault mode.   It code still do stan­dard file encryp­tion, but you wouldn’t be able to have an encrypted partition.

The Iron­key how­ever worked just fine in this con­fig­u­ra­tion.  It was able to decom­press the data and look at the data as it was a nor­mal par­ti­tion.  Since this func­tion­al­ity is a must have it exceeded expectations.

Let’s take a look at the pack­aged software:

When you first insert the drive this is what you see.   You can notice that it cre­ates two drive let­ters (E and F on my com­puter).  The first drive let­ter is unen­crypted and only has the soft­ware unlock­ing pro­gram on it.   If you click on the sec­ond par­ti­tion Win­dows asks you to put a disk in the drive.   So it’s not truly mounted nor readable.

After you run the soft­ware on the first par­ti­tion, you can notice the sec­ond drive now states “Iron­Key Secure Files”.  At this point the par­ti­tion is unen­crytped and ready to read.

This is the first screen you see when you put in the flash drive (and you have auto-run enabled).   If you do not have auto-run enabled you can start this from the first par­ti­tion.   The inter­face is straight for­ward and unas­sum­ing, per­fect for some­one like me.

After two wrong pass­words this is the error mes­sage that pops up.  If the pass­word is entered in ten times incor­rectly the drive will be per­me­nantly locked and the data will no longer be able to be retreived.

When you are suc­cess­ful with enter­ing in your passphrase this is the inter­face the soft­ware presents.  You have four options from this screen.  The secure files option just brings up the encrypted par­ti­tion, which is the same thing you can do by going to “My Com­puter”.   The secure backup allows you to make back-ups of your encrypted par­ti­tion.   The set­tings option allows you to amek device changes.  Finally the lock drive option re-encrypts the con­tents and logs you out of the soft­ware tak­ing you back to the first screen.

The first screen of the secure backup util­ity prompts you for the loca­tion of your Iron­key you wish to backup (I’m assum­ing this is in case you are using mul­ti­ple Ironkey’s at once).   It also allows you choose the loca­tion to save teh backup to.

The sec­ond secure backup screen is as unas­sum­ing as the first.   It allows you to browse to the back-up and restore it directly to your Iron­Key that you have plugged in.

I can say, when I open a set­tings screen I would have thought there would have been more options then this.  The first pref­er­ence on give you the option refor­mat the drive.

The lost and found screen allows you to dis­play a sim­ple mes­sage that pops up on the unecrypted login.  If some soul find your drive they can then send it back to you.  The real ques­tion is if they will burn through the ten pass­word attempts before they do.

The last option is solely for chang­ing the passphrase that you use to unlock your Iron­key stick.  It is sim­ple and precise.

If you need a device that allows full encryp­tion and that is func­tional when you do not have admin­is­tra­tive access to the com­puter it’s used on this is it.   I will say I’m not too happy that they haven’t the OSX or Linux clients that they have been work­ing on, but they state on their site that they will be forthcoming.

If your inter­ested in pick­ing one up from Ama­zon here are some links for you:

Iron­Key 1GB Secure Hardware-Encrypted Flash Drive

Iron­Key 2GB Secure Hardware-Encrypted Flash Drive

Iron­Key 4GB Secure Hardware-Encrypted Flash Drive