Review: McAfee Safeboot for USB security
Date : 01 07 2008 Category : Technology
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Alan Stevens, Personal Computer World, Tuesday 8 January 2008 at 00:00:00
Keep your data safe with these secure USB devices
The recent loss of 25 million child benefit records by Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs highlights the need to be extremely cautious when transporting data. Safeboot, now a part of McAfee, has a way of tackling the problem, with a family of secure USB storage devices that feature strong data encryption and integrated access controls to protect the data they contain. We tested three, starting with the Safeboot for USB Standard, which employs simple passwords to manage access. Multiple users can be defined, each with their own AES-encrypted partition, accessible only when the correct password is supplied. The range also includes the Safeboot for USB Phantom (from £100 ex Vat for a 1GB device), which features a built-in fingerprint scanner, providing two- factor authentication. And lastly there's the Safeboot for USB Midentity (from £141 ex Vat for 1GB), which is slightly different in that it uses a smartcard and Pin number to store encrypted user credentials and can also be used for remote VPN authentication. All three look much like ordinary USB flash memory sticks and can, indeed, be plugged into any PC with a USB 1.1/2 interface to provide up to 4GB of removable storage. Do that, however, and you'll be able to see very little. A public and/or read-only partition may be available, depending on how they've been configured, but that's all. Any other, protected data is hidden and only accessible once the necessary credentials have been verified, which is done by the device itself. Some software is also required. There's a management utility to configure user accounts and their associated storage partitions, and a client application to make the data accessible once the appropriate credentials have been authenticated. The same software is used by both the Standard and Phantom models, though we we found it a little on the simplistic side. However, it worked well enough and, apart from a few teething problems (caused by a general lack of documentation), we encountered no real problems. Separate tools are required to manage and use the Midentity devices. These were clearly from a different developer, had a completely different interface and were much harder to get to grips with. Of the three, the Safeboot for USB Standard proved the quickest to configure and was the easiest to use, requiring no more than a password to open up each protected storage area. To configure the Phantom, users needed to register their fingerprints and we found the built-in scanner awkward to...
