USB Flash Drives

Smurf,

Thanks for that mate.

Cheers

I'm hitting this post even though it's propably dead...

I would just add a truecrypt ( www.truecrypt.org ) volume and stick the truecrypt executable on the disk in the unencrypted space.

Either that or commercial products like PGPDisk and PointSec are not a bad idea.

Cheers,

Having had my laptop nicked recently and all the questions that raises along the lines of "what sensitive data did I have on there?" (fortunately none), the issue of USB key security is anything but dead for me. Many of us use USB keys for file transfer and portability, and if you're like me you just leave stuff on there until it gets full then make a bit of space and carry on again. It's such an easy device to lose and so easy to read (they would have had to trash and reinstall my laptop in order to sell it on down the pub, but a USB key just plugs in and bingo!). Not only that, but I was getting into the habit of using my USB key for backup - I have some documents I'm working on, and after each session I would just dump them to the key with the logic that if my hard disk goes my precious work will be safe. Then I started to think just how small and loseable that USB stick is...
I think it's time to be more careful!

Some of the software Sahirh has touched on do provide a pretty secure way to protect data on USB drives. The only thing i don't like about them (well the one i look at), you need to install the software into the OS to decrypt the portion of the USB thats encrypted. I found that it was almost an All or Nothing approach when i really wanted to utilise part of the USB drive encrypted for sensitive data and the other half for just putting crap onto it for transfering things from one machine to another.

Mmm.. you shouldn't need to install Truecrypt. The installable runs directly like a portable app off the USB. It will load the driver to access the encrypted information and unload it when you've finished.

Yes, now you come to mention it the one i had when i bought my USB Drive worked in the same way. I was thinking of PGPDesktop that i was also playing with.

From what i remember from the one that came with the USB Drive, it kept the executable in an unencrypted part of the USB Drive, it was a while back though when i played with it