More than a Number on my Little Black Brick

I’ve got a little black brick in my pocket. No that’s not a lewd euphemism. My little black brick is a USB key with a difference, provided by Corsair Memory for review.

This USB stick needs no password protection because it’s got a built in padlock. To access the contents, whether that’s your little black e-book, your diary, your bookmarks in the portableapps version of Firefox, your email or whatever, you have to physically press the number buttons on the front face – its keypad – to unlock it.

How neat is that? No more hackable or crackable passwords that could succumb to some bruteforce attack or be circumvented by a denial of service, buffer overrun or boot error. No, to open my little black brick – it’s a 4 Gb Corsair Flash Padlock USB drive, actually – you have to physically press the numbers in the right order and watch the little red LED locked padlock symbol switch to the unlocked green LED.

Now, I feel much more secure carrying my USB drive with me when I’m out and about. If I lose I know for sure that no one will be able to get in. Here are the key features of the Padlock:

• Auto-Locking – it locks itself within 15 seconds of being disconnected from your computer
• Customizable PIN – you set your own PIN (up to
• Locking and unlocking is very straightforward just press all the right buttons
• Plug and play – there is no software to install as the security is hardware based
• It works with Windows, MAC and Linux
• Smaller than a brick, but bigger than other USB thumb drives.

I’m pretty sure no one is ever going to get into my little black brick with the enormous PIN I used. But, even if they did I’ve also used TrueCrypt to encrypt the data files on there with an uberpassword of the kind generated by Steve Gibson’s password generator site, so there’s really no chance of security compromise. For this reason it’s important that you never forget your PIN or your stuffed. That said, you can register your PIN with Corsair’s registration service (which seems slightly self-defeating, to my mind. Actually, their reg page is missing and so they probably thought of that too!)

I asked Passpack’s Tara Kelly how she thought it fits into the data security arsenal:

“I see this USB Padlock as being much more useful for documents containing critical or personal data, that are too large to go into a password manager, but are best not left unprotected,” she told me. “You could even install Passpack Offline on it,” she adds, and points to the recent announcement of Passpack offline on USB. “Passpack’s database is already highly encrypted, but certainly if folks want to tote a copy around on a USB stick, the additional layer of encryption certainly doesn’t hurt,” she says.