the key can no longer be accessed just by guessing the password) and forcing yourself to guess the key itself which is nearly impossible.Kingston Digital Europe Co LLP, the Flash memory affiliate of Kingston Technology Company, Inc., a world leader in memory products and technology solutions, announced its IronKey D300 Encrypted USB Flash Drive series has achieved NATO Restricted Level Certification. But you may be destroying or bypassing any record of how the key is generated/stored (i.e. or you need to physically take the memory out of the USB stick and use specialized hardware to access it. If you want to guess the password you need to do so within the limits of how quickly or how many times it lets you guess. On the other hand a hardware-encrypted drive could refuse to let you read any data at all until you correctly guess. You could return the drive undamaged and the owner might never know it had been accessed and the data had been copied and could eventually be decrypted (as difficult as that may be).

The other issue is you could copy the encrypted data off a software-encrypted drive then take your time guessing the key or password to decrypt it. Whether you use a good password or even bother to use Bitlocker or an equivalent is up to the user and/or the configuration of the computer it’s plugged into. For example you could use (Windows) Bitlocker and the 256-bit encryption key would be un-guessable except the key is derived from a password, and you could make that something easily guessed like “password” or “12345” if you wanted. One thing the article mentions is enforcing complex passwords. I’m not clear why the advantages of hardware encryption are so important but I can guess a few. Sure, you can software-encrypt a flash drive to a high level of security on Mac, Windows, or Linux but that’s just a variety of software encryption techniques. I don’t believe this exact method/level of encryption is used on anything except this drive (and similar ones).

Iron key d300