Password protecting a thumb drive

[trajan22]

Does anyone know if there is a way to password protect your thumb drive. Or any other kind of security that I could add to it.

 

[ganstaman]

I googled "flash drive security" and got a number of good looking hits. Some utilize Window's already built-in encryption for each file you use, others are programs you can download that encrypt/password protect the whole drive.

However, I have not tried any of these and can not in any way vouch for them even being safe. All I am providing here is the answer: "yes, it is possible." If you want to actually go through with this, then you'd either have to research any of the links google turns up or wait for a better response.

Good luck. If you do try this, please let us know what you went with and how it worked because I'm curious about this topic.

 

[trajan22]

Thanks, when I had googled a similar search nothing relevant came up but Ill use the search you used.

 

[NoUse]

You can zip up any of the files that you want on the flash drive and just password protect the zip drives.

 

[Aquafire]

Does anyone know if there is a way to password protect your thumb drive. Or any other kind of security that I could add to it.

Presuming that your using a Windows machine...download this..

http://www.newsoftwares.net/folderlock/howto/password-protect-USB-flash-drive.html

Alternately,

You can always go out and buy a Sandisk Cruzer Flash drive that has a lock / password system (Cruzerlock) already built in.

http://www.sandisk.com/Retail/Default.aspx?CatID=1274

You can buy a Sandisk Cruzer : 1 GB drive for about $10.

Cheap security fo the price of peanuts.

Aquafire

 

[madsmoke9]

ya some of them like the more expencive sandisk have the u3 protection on them i think you can download that somewhere

 

[mgb_phys]

All these just rely on windows loading a driver which decrypts the rest of the drive.
It doesn't work if autorun is turned off, and if you are really paranoid remember the decrypt driver is running on the windows machine.
I don't know any that implement this inside the key micro.

I use truecrypt.org, it's well known/tested and very secure.
You can either encrypt the entire key if you only use it between machines with truecrypt installed or you can create an encrypted volume as a file on the key along with the truecrypt executable. See traveller mode in the docs.

 

[ks_physicist]

Truecrypt is the best solution I have found. It has worked flawlessly for me.

I don't encrypt the whole drive, that way I can run TrueCrypt from the drive and then mount my partition, and I have some space to use on systems where I can't run TrueCrypt (if executables have been disabled).

 

[binzing]

My flash drive came with the possibility built in.