PIN Security Touchscreen for Portable Drive

By Dave Nixon

A Japanese company has the initiative from bank ATM security by offering a portable hard drive that comes with its own integrated PIN keypad.

Appearing more like portable safe than a hard disk, the USB-based EZSecu EZ850 is an enclosure based around a standard 2.5 inch SATA drive of the type recognizable to any laptop user. One side of the unit is dominated by a touchscreen, on which users have to enter a PIN code of up to six characters from a keypad of nine digits plus zero.

Attemps to connect the drive to a PC without entering the PIN code will not be be recognised.

It is not known if its Japanese distributors, the company has the rather disconcerting name, “Digital Cowboy” , will make the EZ850 obtainable outside Japan, nonetheless the westernised branding name advocates that they may do. The drive is reported to cost £70 ($140), and is virtually indistinguishable to a drive from Korean company IOTEK that appeared last November, without actually going on sale.

In addition it is unsure whether the drive security could be evaded by removing the drive from the enclosure and merely reading it through a system with no PIN interface. It is probable that it employs some type of encryption to render the drive unreadabale when removed from the enclosure.

Storage vendors have begun to identify a variety of ways to secure portable storage, ranging from built-in data encryption to PIN entry on USB flash drives. Fingerprint readers have also been utilised.

The benefits of PINs are their straightforwardness, and the reality that the drive bears everything necessary to secure it with no additional software required. Others will dispute that full-drive encryption with software right to use is almost certainly just as convenient for business users.