Although USB thumb drives have become the floppy disks of the 21st century, many of them suffer from pretty fatal flaws: most of the time, anybody with a USB port can tap into any data you’ve stored on a flash drive. So government, military, and even some enterprise and corporate users—not to mention superspies—angle for something better. IronKey aims to deliver with its new S200 USB flash drive, which the company claims is the first and only USB drive to meet U.S. government FIPS 140-2, Security Level 3 standards. That means that not only does the drive over hardware-based 256-bit AES encryption, but the cryptographic module itself is designed to be tamper resistant and can respond to attempts to physically access or modify the module.
“As one of the world’s leading information security companies, IronKey is continually innovating to push the boundaries of security and ease of use,” said IronKey CEO David Jevans, in a statement. “Our new IronKey S200 family of secure USB flash drives puts a whole new level of security into the hands of government, military, and enterprise customers, at an affordable price.”
The S200 also includes anti-malware capabilities (including AutoRun lockdown and a read-only mode), plus trusted network capabilities that enable the drive to only be accessed from trusted PCs—the drive can also lock itself up after a specified idle period. The drive also features remove management and monitoring capabilities, so administrators can tell where and when the drive is being used; there’s even a remote wipe facility in case a drive is lost or stolen.
IronKey isn’t saying what the “affordable price” on the S200 might be, but the drive will be available in capacities up to 16 GB and supports Windows 2000/XP/Vista, as well as Mac OS X and Linux.
