San Disk Cruzer - Comparison With Other Portable Storage - Encryption and Security

Encryption and Security

As highly portable media, USB flash drives are easily lost or stolen. All USB flash drives can have their contents encrypted using third-party disk encryption software, which can often be run directly from the USB drive without installation (for example, FreeOTFE), although some, such as TrueCrypt, require the user to have administrative rights on every computer it's run on.

Archiving software can achieve a similar result by creating encrypted ZIP or RAR files.

Some manufacturers have produced USB flash drives which use hardware-based encryption as part of the design, removing the need for third-party encryption software. In limited circumstances these drives have been shown to have security problems, and are typically more expensive than software-based systems, which are available for free.

A minority of flash drives support biometric fingerprinting to confirm the user's identity. As of mid-2005, this was an expensive alternative to standard password protection offered on many new USB flash storage devices. Most fingerprint scanning drives rely upon the host operating system to validate the fingerprint via a software driver, often restricting the drive to Microsoft Windows computers. However, there are USB drives with fingerprint scanners which use controllers that allow access to protected data without any authentication.

Some manufacturers deploy physical authentication tokens in the form of a flash drive. These are used to control access to a sensitive system by containing encryption keys or, more commonly, communicating with security software on the target machine. The system is designed so the target machine will not operate except when the flash drive device is plugged into it. Some of these "PC lock" devices also function as normal flash drives when plugged into other machines.