Enigma

By Neil J. Rubenking

The historical Enigma Machine was a boxy thing, like a typewriter on steroids, a mechanical-electric encryption tool used by the German military to protect sensitive messages. Polish codebreakers cracked it in 1932, and intelligence from decrypted Enigma messages helped the Allies immensely in WWII. Enova's Enigma is a lot smaller than its historical namesake, no bigger than a standard USB thumb drive, and costs only $79.95 (direct). Plug it in between your computer and any USB mass storage device to seamlessly encrypt all data written to that device. Even the Polish Cipher Bureau won't be able to crack it.

If this description sounds a lot like the CipherUSB device from Addonics, that's only natural. Enova handled manufacturing for that device. Added features make Enigma even more secure.

Enigma uses a technique called Cipher Block Chaining (CBC) to ensure security. The encryption process for each block of plaintext incorporates the ciphertext from the previous block. As a result, someone who managed to crack the encryption of one block would gain nothing but that block.

Enova also sells a $49.95 model that uses Electronic Code Book (ECB) encryption rather than CBC. This style of encryption uses the same key for every block of plaintext, so a hacker who cracked one block could apply the same key to unlock all the data. That's not to say cracking one block would be remotely easy. ECB (also used by CipherUSB) is crack-resistant; CBC is vastly more crack-resistant.

Onboard Setup
While Enigma can be used on any platform or device that supports USB data storage, the initialization and configuration must be performed under Windows. When you plug in Enigma, Windows sees part of it as a CD-ROM drive. This virtual CD-ROM contains the necessary password utility and a quick launch guide. That's a step up from CipherUSB, which required separate download of the utility.

To initialize the device, you enter a recovery password of up to 32 characters. If your Enigma gets lost, damaged, or stolen, you can obtain a new Enigma and enter this password to regain access to your encrypted devices. Anybody with access to the password could do the same, so be sure to use a very strong password and keep it in a very safe place.

Once Enigma is initialized, you can use it to encrypt any USB mass storage device. That includes thumb drives, external drives, card readers, optical drives?anything! Just connect it to the computer with Enigma in between and format it. With Enigma in place, all data written to the drive is encrypted, and all data read from the drive is decrypted. Simple! If you mount the device without using Enigma, Windows will see it as a totally blank drive and offer to format it. Be sure you don't format it by accident, as that will destroy your encrypted data.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/fD78_UEIPS0/0,2817,2408448,00.asp

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