Kingston coughs to security flaw in ‘Secure’ flash driv

[reghakr]

Kingston coughs to security flaw in ‘Secure’ flash driv

Kingston Technology is instructing customers to return certain models of its memory sticks, after the firm discovered a glitch in its DataTraveler Secure flash drives.

The company said in a security notice that the models affected were “privacy” editions of the DataTraveler Secure, DataTraveler Elite and DataTraveler Blackbox.

Kingston said the security flaw could allow a wrongdoer to hack into the memory sticks. “A skilled person with the proper tools and physical access to the drives may be able to gain unauthorised access to data,” warned the vendor.

Kingston added that a number of its USB drives were not affected by the security flaw.

Customers whose drives could be exploited by the security loophole should return the product, where Kingston said it would apply a factory update.

Kingston had claimed that its Data Traveler Secure drive was the first of its kind to protect “100 percent of data on-the-fly via 256-bit hardware-based AES encrpytion.”

Source:Kingston coughs to security flaw in 'Secure' flash drive ? The Register

 

[ITGIRL]

Thanks for this information! We have about 20 of them. Thankfully not the ones on the list.

 

[Jacee]

Mine is okay, thanks for the info!

 

[reghakr]

Actually Sandisk and one other well-known manufacturer were on the list.

Here'sthe full story:

NIST-certified USB Flash drives with hardware encryption cracked

Kingston, SanDisk and Verbatim all sell quite similar USB Flash drives with AES 256-bit hardware encryption that supposedly meet the highest security standards.

This is emphasised by the FIPS 140-2 Level 2 certificate issued by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which validates the USB drives for use with sensitive government data. Security firm

SySS, however, has found that despite this it is relatively easy to access the unencrypted data, even without the required password

More.........http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/NIST-certified-USB-Flash-drives-with-hardware-encryption-cracked-895308.html​