It is a Wednesday you are sitting in the library working on writing your blogs. You look up to take a quick brake from working and notice a guy walking away from the table your sitting at. Just a moment ago without your knowledge your thumb drive as removed from your laptop. You look back down and continue to work; a few minutes later the same man walks back by your seat and put the flash drive back. Within those few minutes the man has stolen all your information off the flash drive and now has all your personal information. This is the perfect opportunity for someone to commit identity fraud and do whatever they want with ‘you’. As college students we have to worry about people trying to steal our work or our identities. An answer has been found and it is called the Ironkey.
The Ironkey is an 8GB USB flash drive. It was created for the government to use in the Middle East but now is available to the public. The Ironkey utilizes the newest advancements in security technology. The outer skin of the flash drive is created with a metal sheet making it very hard to crack or break. The Ironkey is equipped with a hardware encryption chip. This chip scrambles all the data so that it is unusable without the correct password. You might be thinking that it is easy to crack a password but the Ironkey has a solution for those who wish to steal from you. If the password is entered in incorrectly ten times the USB drive instantly sends an electrical surge throughout the drive which wipes the data off of it. So do not ever forget your password otherwise you will end up with a blank drive.
One password encryption sometimes is not that hard to crack so the creators added two more. Yes, that is three encryption codes built on top of one another. Let me break it down for you, there is a 128-bit AES, Advanced Encryption Standard, encryption on all the data that is stored on the drive. Then there is a separate 256-bit AES encryption on the password that solves the 128-bit encryption. And just to make it more complicated they put a SHA 256 hash encryption on the 256-bit encryption. Ok that probably sounds like a whole bunch of mumbo-jumbo, so let me simply it. First the higher the bit count the more possible solutions there are so the harder it is to crack. The creators put a simple encryption on the data which is solvable with the password you use. Then they put a harder encryption on the password itself and put an even better encryption on that. Basically it is almost impossible to crack without the right password.
There is one finally safety measure to tell you about and it has to deal with preventing people from physically opening your flash drive. The contents of the USB drive are coated with an epoxy. The epoxy fills up all the open spaces and turns hard to create one giant solid object. This makes it useless to break into the Ironkey because they will most likely damage the encryption chip. Without that chip they would not be able to read the encrypted data.
The Ironkey is probably one of the most secure computer items I have ever seen. This flash drive would be a great asset to anyone who needs to keep personal information, personal.
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