I have been looking at how to protect a USB Flash drive recently including encrypted USB drives. Some models (the cheapest) just provide a data encryption program to make an encrypted folder on the USB drive.
Others comprise of two 'devices', one is a CD containing the encryption software and the other is the Flash storage volume (similar to U3 USB drives).
Neither of these types are suitable to support USB booting because we need the BIOS to be able to read the unencrypted drive sectors on power up.
Another type of encrypted USB drive is the type that has a PIN keypad. This type encrypts the data as it comes in or out of the USB drive. The data is stored in an encrypted form on the flash memory, but any external device will 'see' the unencrypted data (if the correct PIN is used).
I found several models of encrypted USB Flash drives that require a PIN number to unlock them. There seems to be only four different ones however, as many of them appear to be re-badged\re-branded versions of the same thing:
Others comprise of two 'devices', one is a CD containing the encryption software and the other is the Flash storage volume (similar to U3 USB drives).
Neither of these types are suitable to support USB booting because we need the BIOS to be able to read the unencrypted drive sectors on power up.
Another type of encrypted USB drive is the type that has a PIN keypad. This type encrypts the data as it comes in or out of the USB drive. The data is stored in an encrypted form on the flash memory, but any external device will 'see' the unencrypted data (if the correct PIN is used).
I found several models of encrypted USB Flash drives that require a PIN number to unlock them. There seems to be only four different ones however, as many of them appear to be re-badged\re-branded versions of the same thing: