14 DAY TRIAL // Though most USB flash drives are simple solutions for carrying data around easily, there are also a number of such devices that come with advanced security features such as hardware encryption, password protection and automatic data deletion. Such drives are mainly aimed at the professional and government sectors, where trade secrets and sensible data demand a storage unit capable of keeping the data off-limits.
Kingston is one of the companies known to provide a line of flash drives that meet the needs of this market. Known as the DataTraveler 5000, this series of portable storage devices was launched about three months ago and has now made its way to the European market for government and professional data-storage solutions.
Kingston spared no expense when putting together its drives, making sure that they were as close to invulnerability as possible, both to hacking as well as to physical tampering. In regards to physical security, the DataTraveler 5000 boast a stainless-steel casing coated in titanium, with a tamper-evident design. As for shielding the data itself, the drives' feature set includes the 256-bit AES hardware encryption, an XTS cypher and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). The storage devices are also FIPS 140-2 Level 2 certified with Level 3 pending, and meet Suite B standards approved by the U.S. government.
“The Kingston DataTraveler 5000 delivers unsurpassed levels of security and encryption to government and enterprise customers,” Steve Hall, Flash business development manager, KingstonDigital Europe, said. “This portable data solution represents state-of-the-art data protection while providing end users with the simplicity of plug and play.”
The Kingston DataTraveler 5000 flash drives come in capacities of 2, 4, 8 and 16GB, operate on the USB 2.0 interface and are accompanied by a five-year warranty. Finally, they are priced at 82 Euro, 103 Euro, 129 Euro and 298 Euro, respectively, and will also be available with an on-board Malware-scanning application via the company's customizations program.