The Ironkey - This Drive Will Self-Destruct In...

I have a bad tendency to lose track of small objects, especially my thumb drives. I've actually managed to keep my latest one for several months. However, since I seem to go through them rather quickly, I try to spend as little on them as possible. This new one I would gladly drop the extra dough for.

The Ironkey is by far one of the coolest flash drives I've ever seen. Looking at it doesn't really give you the feeling of "coolest thing ever," but remember, beauty is only skin deep. This military-grade drive is encrypted with the passwords stored in a separate hardware-encrypted area of the drive's memory. It's first locally encrypted with 256-bit AES with randomly generated keys encrypted with a SHA-256 hash. Then everything is encrypted again with 128-bit AES hardware encryption. If you don't know what all of that stands for, it means that it's going to be a bitch to hack.

If someone is really determined, they could always pop the case off and access the memory chips. Unfortunately for them, it's filled with epoxy, which will once again make it a bitch for anyone to hack. What about the old-fashioned method of just guessing someone's password? That's where it gets really fun. If you enter more than 10 incorrect passwords in a row, the encryption chip will actually self-destruct. That means no one's getting into the memory, ever. Just don't tell your friends that it'll do this, or they'll be eager to put that feature to the test.

Ironkey: Military Grade Data Security [via crunchgear]