Everything stored, executed and saved to the disk is encrypted and, as hardware encryption is in place, everything works extremely fast. All the data is encrypted in hardware using AES CBC-mode encryption.
The Cryptochip operations follow industry’s best practices, therefore the device uses only well-established and thoroughly tested cryptographic algorithms. Breaking into the device will only destroy it and you can automatically say goodbye to the data on board. The casing is waterproof and tamper resistant. IronKey sports a rather elegant and simple design with a rugged metal casing. When the tagline of the product is “The world’s most secure flash drive”, you are definitely interested in hearing about the specs. Just in case you are curious, the Enterprise version provides the following additional performance: enforceable security policies, remote device termination, RSA SecureID support, as well as automatic antivirus scanning.
I will talk about all these functions later in the review. These include Internet protection services, the identity manager and support for the Verisign Identity Protection (VIP) offering. Basic, as the lower level offering, is to be used primarily as a secure storage device, while Personal has some advantages. IronKey drives come in three “flavors” – Basic, Personal and Enterprise. From the storage perspective this is the basic model, but for this review, storage is not an important factor.
The device used as a basis of this article is the IronKey Personal with 1GB of storage.