If you are enamored of fingerprint USB memory sticks and your computer runs Windows, we heartily recommend the Kanguru Bio AES (from Kanguru Solutions), our TopTenREVIEWS Gold Award winner, not because of its biometric flash drive technology but because it simultaneously offers a more reliable security alternative: password authentication. (In fact, unless you crave the science fiction thrill of data access via biometrics, we would recommend the Kanguru Defender Elite, which offers password authentication without a fingerprint USB scanner option.)
Secure thumb drives including fingerprint USB drives are the industry’s response to the disastrous losses of data that began to occur as soon as the first thumb drives became available. Secure drives based on finger scanning and/or encryption saved a product category that might have fallen by the wayside if the highly portable memory devices could not have been secured. Governments and corporations were banning USB drives and super gluing shut the USB ports on issued computers before the industry responded with security options.
The carnage in the wake of unsecured memory sticks is not pretty. In 2006, U.S. authorities discovered that an employee of Los Alamos National Laboratory had drives containing nuclear weapons documents in his residence. Among the documents were details of methods to bypass U.S. nuclear weapons security locks. During the following year, 2007, a U.S. soldier misplaced a drive with personal videos that soon appeared on Iraqi TV, edited to support a propagandistic agenda. In 2008, a government employee outside of a pub in the United Kingdom dropped an unsecured flash drive that held personal details of 12 million people including National Insurance numbers and credit card information. In 2009, United States-based Health Net misplaced a flash drive with the records of 1.5 million clients. Despite the availability of affordable secure thumb drives, millions of records continue to be lost by government agencies, hospitals, schools and psychiatric facilities.
Although we call them drives, fingerprint USB drives are not actually drives. They are constructed with solid-state flash memory, so they lack the moving mechanical parts previously associated with storage drives. Nevertheless, they continue to be called fingerprint USB drives because the mass storage standard for Windows, Macintosh and Linux computers operates on them with the same system commands that operating systems use to read from and write to mechanical storage drives.
Although the Kanguru Bio AES fingerprint USB lacks the Macintosh and Linux support of its rival, the Transcend JetFlash 220 USB Flash Drive, it has a better warranty. The Kanguru and the Transcend both have scanners that can read fingerprints at a resolution of 508 dots per inch and they both store up to 10 fingerprint record templates. The BUSlink Biometric Fingerprint USB Flash Drive also takes a back seat to the winner of our review for three reasons: it stores five fingerprint record templates instead of 10, it uses a proprietary encryption scheme instead of 256-bit AES and its warranty expires after one year.
Unlike the fingerprint USB drive from Transcend Information, Kanguru Solutions has gone to the trouble to earn FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) validation for its implementation of the 256-bit AES (Advanced Encryption Standard). FIPS validation is required for unclassified cryptographic uses by departments within the United States Government and the Government of Canada. The 256-bit AES is so powerful that the United States Government prohibits exportation of the technology to the areas of Afghanistan that are under the control of the Taliban, Cuba, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria.
The Kanguru Bio AES is immune to the security vulnerabilities associated with fingerprint USB memory sticks because it provides a password-authentication alternative. Although there are arguments for portable drives that have scanners, there are also arguments against scanners. Arguments for secure products based on biometrics are that they are more convenient to use than passwords, malware that needs to log keystrokes to steal passwords has nothing to steal and data access is denied to everybody except the owners of authorized fingerprints.
Any arguments for fingerprint USBs lose traction in the light of countervailing arguments. Some human beings have fingers that resist scanning. And some fingers with initial success at being read, sometimes become unreadable at the most inopportune moments. Another liability to fingerprint USB technology becomes apparent after an employee is terminated or resigns. Without the cooperation of the user, the contents cannot be accessed by administrators or law enforcement. Detractors of the technology also point out that it is possible to build gummy fingers that spoof scanners at a rate more predictable than the flipping of a coin. To reiterate: the Kanguru Bio AES successfully ducks the various arguments against fingerprint USBs because it offers password-protection security in addition to biometrics, a fact that provides a powerful competitive advantage over fingerprint USB sticks whose sole security is biometric.
Another competitive differentiator of the Kanguru Bio AES fingerprint USB drive is the optional Kanguru Remote Management Console (KRMC), a web based application that allows for the remote management of fingerprint USB drives. Whenever lost or stolen fingerprint USB drives are connected to a web-enabled computer, administrators can detect their presence and automatically delete the data that they contain. The optional module allows administrators to locate devices based on the IP address, network location and host name. Administrators can remotely assign the number of invalid login attempts allowed before the drive is wiped clean. Administrators can also change user passwords and assign the rate at which passwords must be changed.
Technical support is by telephone and web form. The warranty lasts for three years.
For Windows users who really want a solid-state flash drive with biometrics, the Kanguru Bio AES is best because it also offers the more reliable password-authentication approach to security. The combination of password protection and encryption supports formidable security. Not only does this solid-state fingerprint USB flash drive offer 256-bit encryption, its vendor has gone to the trouble to receive the Federal Information Processing Standard validation that qualifies it to be on the approved vendor list for government departments in the United States and Canada.
We recommend the product, not because of its scanner, but because it also offers password protection. If you want to consider secure portable storage sticks other than biometric flash drives, please visit our review of secure USB drives, where you will find products that employ password protection as opposed to scanner-based protection.
