The recommended to way to secure a flash drive is to protect it by a password that cannot be either easily guessed or cracked using computer methods. In this respect the password should be at least 10 characters long and made up of alpha numeric characters that in themselves contain no recognisable words.

An example of a good passwords is: gH83FL98Cv - in this example, even if someone knew the length of the password there are: 62 to the power of 10* possibilities of getting the correct match - this number is 839,299,366,000,000,000 If a computer can guess say a million 10 character passwords per second in an attempt to crack the password it would take 839,299,366,000 seconds to ensure a hit - this is about 26,000 years. Even if the computer only had to check one tenth of the possibilities before hitting the right password it would still take 2,600 years. If you increase the password length this figure increases exponentially.

*Note: 62 = 26 characters in the alphabet doubled (52) because they can be either upper or lower case and finally the character can be a number 0 to 10 giving an additional 10, totalling 62. In this example there are 10 characters giving the power of 10.

An example of a bad password is: FredSmith101252 (i.e. maybe a name followed by or preceded by a date of birth). Whilst this sort of password may deter or prevent a casual user from access, it would not prevent a serious computer hack or even an intelligent guess).

The second requirement is to ensure that the data on the disk is encrypted so that anyone attempting to use tools to read the data, by bypassing any password entry, will not be able to reconstruct the data in a readable form. There are several encryption methods that can be used, the one that is secure and well tested is AES. AES encryption is the choice of many world governments (including the USA) to secure secret information.

So how do you process to your flash drive so that it meets the above requirements?

If you are a company that uses 50 or more drives then it may be worth purchasing or using a free program that formats your drives to meet these requirements. These programs are usually either expensive or the free ones are not easy to use but financially it may be worth it.

Individual users or small companies that only require a few drives usually 1 to 49 it makes more sense to buy drives ready formatted, set up, and tested. Such drives can be purchased from this site and are probably the best value that can be obtained; costing little more that an ordinary flash drive itself.

 

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