Product: IronKey Personal Secure USB Flash Drive (2GB)
Supplier: IronKey, Inc.
MSRP: $109.99     Find Lowest Price @ PriceGrabber
Author: Barry (Ravenium)
Date: December 20, 2008

USB flash drives have become amazingly cheap these days – much like the floppy disk of old (anyone remember those?), it’s become the default method for transferring data between computers. However, because of their small size and their prevalence, they are very often lost, stolen, or broken. Despite this, most people don’t give any thought to securing the data they store on them – we either assume we’ll always have them on our person or in our control. Even if we use disk encryption (such as PGP or TrueCrypt), that is much better suited for use on a single dedicated system as opposed to something you can use easily on multiple machines.

Enter the IronKey. While most USB drives do allow for, and work well with disk encryption, the IronKey is intended to be an answer to many portable security issues users might have. The IronKey protects against hostile networks, and includes utilities for storing passwords, and clean browsing software. In effect, the IronKey is your very own bastion of portable security, meant to survive whatever you throw at it and keep your data out of prying hands without too much interference.

First Impressions:

My first thought upon taking it out of the packaging was: “Wow, this thing is heavy!” Granted it’s only a difference of ounces, but the physical appearance of the IronKey gives every impression of security – it’s made of metal and filled with epoxy. I can’t imagine anyone being able to take it apart without fatally damaging the flash chip beyond recovery. In contrast to my other USB drives, which are made of mainly plastic, the IronKey has a decidedly solid feel to it.

The cap has a solid rubber gasket inside that keeps the unit waterproof to military specifications. . One deviation from many flash drive designs that I am glad to see is that the lanyard attaches to the flash drive instead of just the cap. The rubber in the cap that keeps the unit waterproof makes the cap very difficult to remove right now, but I don’t know how that will hold up over time.

Taking it for a Spin:

Much has been written about the IronKey’s hardware encryption, read/write performance, and other aspects, but I wanted to know how it would perform beyond simple storage purposes. After all, there is a complete secure browsing solution onboard! After a quick setup procedure to set a master password (which is backed up on IronKey’s website, a very handy feature should you lose your key/password), I was prompted to unlock the key:

But wait, there’s more – if you so desire, IronKey will also back up the passwords you choose to store on the USB drive, which will save you many a headache should the drive be stolen. Fair warning, should you lose the password and guess incorrectly too many times, your IronKey will disable itself permanently, meaning that all of your data will be lost! While I appreciate the Mission Impossible-style nature of this, I would be very upset to find that a jealous co-worker or ex-girlfriend decided to burn me for nearly $100 by destroying my drive.

Once logged in, the user is presented with The IronKey Control Panel.

As can be seen from the above screen shot, you can; view the files on the disk, back up the drive content to an encrypted file on your disk, or (most interesting to me), manage passwords for your favorite websites.

The only application installed is Firefox (to offer secure browsing), but I suspect given enough time one could install more than one portable application on the drive (SSH client, SFTP, things you might want to take with you for secure communication, editors, etc). The nice thing about portable applications is that they don’t write to the registry or the computer at all, which gives you your own independent suite of apps on a flash drive without leaving traces of your visit (or data) behind on a PC.

On to the password manager – I’m an avid user of PasswordSafe, so I was looking forward to an easier and integrated way to store and use my passwords. Granted, I could just put PasswordSafe on the drive, but that’s not nearly as slick as having the IronKey drive auto-populate credentials when I visit a site bookmark, is it?

One minor grief about the password manager – it’s designed to be automated for adding passwords for websites, but is so much so that I had to add bogus entries in order for it to store extra (non-automatic entry) passwords. If you attempt to add manual bookmarks, it only includes the name and URL, and does not have a space for storing the username/password. It would be nice if the IronKey included better password management features, but that wasn’t a show stopper.

A relatively unsung feature of the IronKey is its secure browsing add-on for Firefox. It should probably be called “anonymous browsing” as it’s a bit more accurate, but it’s a poor man’s VPN of sorts as it uses the Tor routing technology to tunnel the browser’s connection to one of the designated anonymous browsing proxies around the world. This is a great feature if you happen to be on a hostile network (such as an internet café, a campus network, or at a LAN party). There are free Firefox add-ons that do the same thing, but I found that the IronKey’s solution was better integrated and pre-configured for convenience.

Performance:

The main concern regarding performance is that the IronKey needs to hold up against a typical flash drive for transfer speeds . After all, what good is a secure storage medium if you’re waiting forever to move or save files? A few benchmarks and a comparative file test later, the results were encouraging:

As can be seen from the above table, the IronKey keeps pace and even beats an unencrypted volume in this (relatively unscientific, but real-world) file copy test.

Cross-platform Compatibility:

The IronKey is advertised to work with Linux and Mac systems, but both these platforms are somewhat in beta. To better understand why, I plugged the drive into a Linux desktop system (Backtrack) as well as my TV recording PC (Knoppix). Given that I work with Backtrack (a Linux distribution focused on network security) a fair bit, I was a bit disappointed to find that it didn’t mount the drive properly, even after following the instructions. Luckily, Knoppix mounted it fine – I suspect it was just a kernel module/file system driver/random issue. Given BackTrack’s purpose, and the numerous flavors of Linux out there, this isn’t too surprising.

Final Thoughts:

At nearly $100 for a 2 GB drive (my 4 GB SanDisk was under $20), the IronKey is probably not for a casual home PC user who is looking for a cheap file transfer solution. However, for the frequent traveler such as a consultant, student, or just even the security conscious or paranoid, the extra features and rugged construction are well worth it. In essence, this isn’t just a secure flash drive, it’s a security pocket knife of sorts.

Given the single-cell flash memory (which in short is more expensive but faster and longer lasting) onboard, this drive is designed to last a long time. In a world filled with numerous stories of data loss and theft, carrying an IronKey can go a long way to ensuring your data doesn’t become a statistic.

Pros:

+ Rugged, durable construction
+ Excellent transfer speed (equal to or better than anything I had on hand)
+ Ability to use portable applications (not U3, but similar functionality)
+ Onboard web browser functionality works well for automatically storing/entering login credentials as well as providing clean browsing

Cons:

- More expensive than most flash drives
- Password Manager interface needs more manual interaction for adding/deleting credentials if they cannot be auto-populated
- Cross-platform features still need some work

Tags: flash drive, IronKey, Secure, USB