Back in November of 2008, Lenovo touted its new USB Secure Hard Drive. Something truly befitting of ThinkPad: an external drive that incorporated a number pad for secure, hardware-based protection of your data. It turns out you can get something that is at least very similar for a good bit less coin in the Aegis Padlock.
The physical similarities are quickly apparent, differing only in aesthetics and keypad placement. The Lenovo version is touted to have 128-bit encryption, while the Aegis Padlock supports up to 256-bit encryption for an extra price. You can also get higher capacities from Aegis, up to 500GB compared to Lenovo’s 320GB. Price is of course the biggest differentiator, with the ThinkPad Secure USB Hard Drive in 320GB capacity running $199. Aegis’ Padlock 320GB costs only $109 MSRP for the 128-bit version, or $129 for 256-bit.
But do you get a soft, rubberized paint and classic ThinkPad stlying? I think not.
Source: [Apricorn Aegis Padlock] & [Lenovo Blogs: Design Matters]
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
These are better than nothing in terms of security but the limiting factor is how many digits it’s reasonable to punch into the keypad. The Apricorn even only allows 16 digits maximum, or 10**16 possible keys, not anything like 2**128 which is around 10**38. A fast PC these days might be able to test 10**7 keys per second, so if you can scrounge a few weeks of time on a 1000 node cluster (maybe you work at a web site and they have a server farm that size that has idle cycles in the off-peak hours) you could bust one of these things in a few weeks. Then there is the matter of the encryption mode, which gets a bit technical but basically if you want to really use these things securely you need special drivers.
Looking at the manual for the Aegis Padlock it is clear that they thought of what none said above. The maximum number of trys one would get would be 100 attempts to crack it. After 100 bad attempts the best anyone could do is to reformat the drive.
I supose it would be possible to remove the hard drive from the enclosure and connect it to a machine and use an algorithm to crack it. I would think that the hardware would be adding to the its own key to the keypad entry to make it even more difficult to crack.
Of course I could be wrong. It may be that all these harddrives use the same key internally and the only thing the keypad does is lets the hardware know that it is authorized to decrypt the data. I would like to hear from anyone with more knowledge of these drives.
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