Chris Blankenship's Ramblings

On Monday Jesper Johansson wrote a post about an interesting USB product called Take Pocket Safe.  While most USB devices provide minimal if any encryption this little gem has something I haven’t seen before:  a keypad.  You have to enter in a pin in order for the device to become responsive to the computer.  And when locked the data is protected using 256-bit AES encryption.  Genius.

This concept really intrigues me, as the concept of having to enter a pin before the device is functional seems very useful.  Currently I have a server at my customer site which I use Bitlocker protect the contents of the drives.  I have been forced to carry a USB stick for the encryption key because my server doesn’t have a built-in TPM chip.  Now I can simply leave the USB device attached to the server and unlock the USB device only when it needs to provide the Bitlocker unlocking key.

On a side note:  I currently own an IronKey Secure USB device but found it too bulky and cumbersome to load onto various computers where I didn’t have administrator access.  While I like the idea of Ironkey I don’t care for the implementation.

What do you think?  Is this an extremely useful device or just another tech gadget that’s destined for the bottom of my desk drawer?