Although we call them drives, fingerprint USB drives are not mechanical drives but solid-state flash memory. Computer operating systems use the same read/write commands on flash that they use for mechanical drives. We continue to call these products drives even though there are no moving parts.
The TopTenREVIEWS Silver Award winner, Transcend JetFlash 220 USB Flash Drive from Transcend Information, has a number of distinct advantages over the BUSlink Biometric Fingerprint USB Flash Drive from Global Silicon Electronics. It has a better warranty. It supports Macintosh and Linux computers in addition to Windows PCs. It stores more unique fingerprint templates. And it uses a more respected encryption scheme.
Fingerprint USB drives are one of the two main types of secure memory sticks that the storage industry deployed in response to the catastrophic data leaks that began almost as soon as the first unsecured thumb drives were available. In spite of the availability of affordable and secure USB flash drives, millions of records are lost by hospitals and psychiatric facilities, government agencies and universities. In 2009, the records of 1.5 million Health Net clients went missing in the United States because of a lost flash drive. In 2008, a United Kingdom government employee dropped an unsecured thumb drive outside of a pub. It contained National Insurance numbers and credit card information for 12 million people. In 2007, when an American serviceman lost a personal drive that contained videos, they soon appeared on Iraqi TV, edited to turn them into propaganda. In 2006, U.S. authorities were alarmed to find a drive with nuclear weapons plans in the residence of a Los Alamos National Laboratory employee. Among the documents were procedures to bypass U.S. nuclear weapons security locks.
Biometric USB flash memory is one approach to security. Another method is to use passwords. While our fingerprint USB product category winner, the Kanguru Bio AES happily supports fingerprint scanning and passwords, the Transcend JetFlash 220 depends on scanning alone to protect its data. Proponents of biometric flash drives are keen to tout that the human fingerprint is a unique identifier and that malware that depends on keystroke logging doesn’t have any password to steal.
Detractors of the technology acknowledge that fingerprint USB products are certainly more convenient to use than password-protected flash. The convenience of fingerprint USB flash drives is soon forgotten, however, in light of some pitfalls. The scanners installed on fingerprint USB products are not built from the highest available biometric components, and the onboard central processing unit is not as powerful as the computer that it attaches to. Therefore the fingerprint scanning is not always reliable. A fingerprint USB scanner might work for a long time, only to start balking when presented with a fingerprint that it previously validated. Compounding the challenge of the technology is the fact that some people’s fingers are resistant to biometrics. Another frustrating aspect of fingerprint USB flash memory is that an uncooperative employee can prevent an employer from accessing the data after the employee resigns or is terminated.
Fingerprint USB flash drives are vulnerable to spoofing by counterfeit gummy fingers. Japanese researchers in the Graduate School of Environmental and Information Science at Yokohama National University have created gummy fingers that spoof scanners at an 80-percent success rate. We are not talking about science fiction, but actual, repeatable experiments that should give cause for pause when it comes to biometrics. The state of the art for scanners is inferior to password protection.
The Transcend JetFlash 220 has a scan image resolution of 508 dots per inch. It can save ten fingerprint records. It is designed with a rotating cover that protects the connector from damage. Encryption is extremely powerful: 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). The encryption is so strong that the United States Government prohibits its exportation to Afghanistan (specifically the regions controlled by the Taliban), Cuba, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria.
After the user authenticates with a finger swipe, this fingerprint USB drive supports logging onto websites without typing usernames or passwords. It will also store Internet Explorer Favorites so that when it is attached to different computers, the user has access to favorite URLs. The product supports private and public partitions that users can resize according to need. A couple of other useful features are the ability to create a private virtual disk on a computer hard drive and the ability to temporarily lock a computer so that it is inaccessible while the owner is away.
The warranty lasts for two years. Technical support is available by telephone or email.
Although it is better in a number of ways than the Buslink Biometric Fingerprint Drive, the Transcend JetFlash 220 is no match for the Kanguru Bio AES. Although they both use 256-bit encryption, Transcend Information has not gone to the trouble to achieve Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) validation for its 256-bit AES, which means that the JetFlash 220 is not approved for sale for unclassified cryptographic uses within departments of the Canadian and U.S. governments.
The JetFlash 220 does try harder than the Kanguru in two ways: The JetFlash 220 is RoHS compliant (which means that it does not contain toxic metals), and it supports Macintosh and Linux machines in addition to Windows. The Kanguru’s functionality is restricted to Windows. But because we are skeptical of fingerprint USB memory products that rely completely on biometrics for security, we wouldn’t advise a Macintosh or Linux user (or Windows user for that matter) to choose the JetFlash 220. Any products that support Macintosh or Linux in our review of secure USB drives would be preferable, even though their security is completely based on passwords. The reason that we recommend the Kanguru Bio AES to Windows users in our review of fingerprint USB memory is that it employs scanning or passwords to secure data.
