Kingston Presses on with its Highest Security Flash Drive Yet

Unfettered by recent setbacks to certain drive models, Kingston puts out another line of secure flash drives, the Data Traveler 5000. Obtaining a FIPS 140-2 level 2 certification already, the drive's data has been secured and hardware encrypted to high government standards. The drives also manage to fold in anti-spyware software as well. The advanced functions of this drive are accomplished with a dual partition similar to that of U3. The first partition is read-only and loads the encryption software and, if successfully authenticated, mounts and decrypts the AES-256 encrypted data partition. One of the most overlooked problems with personal encryption standards is brute force password hacking. If someone gets a previous-gen drive, eventually a password can be guessed by simple scripting programs. This might take time but fast computers can make quick work of most passwords. Not true for the DataTraveler 5000 drives, 10 unsuccessful password attempts and the encryption key is destroyed and the data becomes almost completely unrecoverable.

The Data Traveler 5000 is also waiting to get its FIPS 140-2 level 3 certification, which rival IronKey S200 has already obtained earlier. It should be just a matter of testing time for the tamper evident features of the drive to receive passing marks. Special seals on the drives clearly show whether the drive has been altered while out of your sight. This sealing may also contribute to the fact that the drive is also waterproof. There's definitely a premium to be paid for this level of security. The drives range from $111 to $400 for drives only having 2 to 16GB of storage. This is about 10 times the price of normal drives but many companies are finding out that their secrets are worth many times more than that.