IronKey Review

First of all I need to apologize to the IronKey Team, I got these devices serveral months ago and I did not test them out right away, I got them in the midst of a temporary move and put them away until we moved into our new place. That took much longer than I anticipated.

First impressions, it is huge compared to my SanDisk. The IronKey is almost 3 times it size; however, there is a reason for this SECURITY. Physical, electronic, and physical access. It is designed to withstand some physical abuse and water; electronically, the drives are not mounted until you clear the secure login; and then lastly the USB key is filled with a resin to protect the hardware which fills in every nook and cranny.

The best place to see how the encryption works is the IronKey website, they have a very good video that provides a virtual cut-away.

The usb device has a chip that handles the encryption and the software that drives the device. This chip provides full flash encryption which can kill the flash drive if the password is entered incorrectly to many times. Some people may balk at this feature; however, the IronKey team provides 2 different ways to protect against the loss of your data; 1) you can us the back-up service that comes with the device and stores it with IronKey or 2) you can create an encrypted data blob that will sit on your computer. You can recover your data if the device is destroyed after purchasing a new IronKey and then connecting to the server or running the restore option from the USB key.

Portable FireFox (FF) is the whole enchilada! I was able to move my FF profile to the IronKey and have all my plug-ins and settings take hold right away. I was also able to update FF to the latest version. As for the TOR feature [the anonymous web surfing], FireFox has a built in button that allows you to easily turn the TOR Client On and Off. I was surprised how quickly it pulled up websites and I was able to move around the web. From what I have been able to learn IronKey provides a private TOR network for IronKey users – this can be seen as good or bad . . . you will have to decide.

Overall, if you need lots of security for portable docs or you need a secure [and portable web browser] IronKey is worth the size and cost trade-offs.

I have two sets of screenshots, one is for the Enterprise Version and Personal Version.

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Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte did an interview with Dave Jevans, CEO of IronKey and they focused on the security and it works, so if you want a technical review, see Security Now #135.