Kingston Expands Secure USB Drive Line With DataTraveler 6000 Series
Kingston Digital, Inc. (an affiliate of Kingston Technology Company, Inc.) is not messing around with its ultra-secure USB flash drives. Today, the company announced that the DataTraveler 6000 series is now available, joining Kingston Digital’s already robust crop of secure USB flash drive products.
The 6000 series features a slew of security features, including Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 Level 3 Validation, 256-bit AES encryption enabled by Spyrus using XTS block cipher mode, and military-grade elliptic curve cryptography (ECC).
Additionally, the drives feature secure channel communication, firmware updates that are digitally signed with Suite B SHA-384 and ECDSA P-384, tamper-free AutoRun enforcement, and the ability to run with AutoRun disabled.
Users must set their own password, and Kingston designed the drives to force users to actually use strong ones; there are no pathetically weak “admin”, “password”, or “123456” passwords allowed. In fact, the passwords have to have at least three of the following: lowercase, uppercase, characters, and numbers. Once that password is set, users had better remember it, because after 10 intrusion attempts, the drives lock down and kill the encryption key.
Even the casing is designed to be impervious to tampering. It’s also waterproof up to four feet, has a titanium-coated stainless steel casing, and comes with a five-year warranty.
Despite all the powerful features built into these drives, the DataTraveler 6000 series don’t support USB 3.0. Kingston claims read/write speeds of 11MBps and 5MBps, respectively.
The DataTraveler 6000 series flash drives are compatible with Windows
XP/Vista/7 and Mac OS X 10.5 through 10.6 and come in 2GB, 4GB, 8GB, and
16GB capacities.
How much will all this secure goodness run you? The 2GB version is $100, and you’ll pay $116 (4GB), $147 (8GB), or $208 (16GB) for the larger-capacity versions.
For as useful as USB flash drives are, they cause their fair share of problems for enterprises and government agencies. Unsurprisingly due to their diminutive size, flash drives are frequently misplaced, whether they’re left plugged into a computer in lab, fall off of a keychain, or slide out of a pants pocket in a taxi, leaving their contents exposed to whomever stumbles across the little device next. Flash drives also tend to be vulnerable to user-inflicted destruction; if you’ve never accidentally dropped a flash drive or sent one through the laundry cycle, you’re in a very small minority.
When you consider how sensitive the information on a flash drive can be, especially in financial companies and government agencies, the preceding two paragraphs are deeply unsettling. However, the Kingston DataTraveler 6000 series of USB flash drives protect users (and by proxy, organizations) from much of the aforementioned maladies. In that light, $100 for a 2GB drive may be well worth the cost.
The 6000 series features a slew of security features, including Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 Level 3 Validation, 256-bit AES encryption enabled by Spyrus using XTS block cipher mode, and military-grade elliptic curve cryptography (ECC).
Additionally, the drives feature secure channel communication, firmware updates that are digitally signed with Suite B SHA-384 and ECDSA P-384, tamper-free AutoRun enforcement, and the ability to run with AutoRun disabled.Users must set their own password, and Kingston designed the drives to force users to actually use strong ones; there are no pathetically weak “admin”, “password”, or “123456” passwords allowed. In fact, the passwords have to have at least three of the following: lowercase, uppercase, characters, and numbers. Once that password is set, users had better remember it, because after 10 intrusion attempts, the drives lock down and kill the encryption key.
Even the casing is designed to be impervious to tampering. It’s also waterproof up to four feet, has a titanium-coated stainless steel casing, and comes with a five-year warranty.
Despite all the powerful features built into these drives, the DataTraveler 6000 series don’t support USB 3.0. Kingston claims read/write speeds of 11MBps and 5MBps, respectively.
The DataTraveler 6000 series flash drives are compatible with Windows
XP/Vista/7 and Mac OS X 10.5 through 10.6 and come in 2GB, 4GB, 8GB, and
16GB capacities.How much will all this secure goodness run you? The 2GB version is $100, and you’ll pay $116 (4GB), $147 (8GB), or $208 (16GB) for the larger-capacity versions.
For as useful as USB flash drives are, they cause their fair share of problems for enterprises and government agencies. Unsurprisingly due to their diminutive size, flash drives are frequently misplaced, whether they’re left plugged into a computer in lab, fall off of a keychain, or slide out of a pants pocket in a taxi, leaving their contents exposed to whomever stumbles across the little device next. Flash drives also tend to be vulnerable to user-inflicted destruction; if you’ve never accidentally dropped a flash drive or sent one through the laundry cycle, you’re in a very small minority.
When you consider how sensitive the information on a flash drive can be, especially in financial companies and government agencies, the preceding two paragraphs are deeply unsettling. However, the Kingston DataTraveler 6000 series of USB flash drives protect users (and by proxy, organizations) from much of the aforementioned maladies. In that light, $100 for a 2GB drive may be well worth the cost.
