Recommend me some USB stick encryption software please

[Mook]

I've looked around and short of buying a corporate license, which we don't need, I need a piece of software I can license and install on a couple of PCs which will allow me to encrypt a USB drive and you need a password to access any of the content on it.

 

I don't mind paying for it and I don't want something built into the Windows OS.

 

Ta

[Andy_Bangle]

Chaz, if your staff/clients clients are comfortable using PGP and exchanging keys, that will provide extremely good security to the data. And self decrypting PGP archives means exchanging passphrases instead of keys - which is likely easier for the client but also secure for the data if the passphrases are properly selected. Plus, the price can be right for PGP by using the Open Source version, GPG.

GPG runs on a variety of platforms, so it's not limited to only Windows or a particular flavour of Linux. And worse case, you can get the source code and compile it for almost any platform.

Depending on the level of security you require It maybe worth looking at Apricorn drives for additional security functions as well, incuding the ability to destroy the data (actually just the encryption keys) after a certain number of failed access attempts - like with iPhones or Blackberrys - and the ability to use the external drives without added software (they use AES encryption implemented in hardware) or local admin rights (we've taken that away from most users). Our specific applications for the drives makes them a closer fit to our requirements than PGP. But we do use PGP full disk encryption on our laptops.

Of course, there's always more than one way to get things done as these Apricorn drives are not cheap!! So another option is the use of WinZip self extracting archives using AES encryption. You can email or upload the 'packet' securely.

I often use WinZip (256-bit) and TrueCrypt and send links to the files by GoogleDrive. Overall, TrueCrypt is a better choice because quite a few email servers block zips, per se.

Edited February 26, 2015 by Andy_Bangle