When you're manufacturing a portable storage solution that's touted as being one of the world's safest, you have to be able to deliver a very high level of protection for the sensitive data stored within the respective drives, whether we're talking about the physical safety or the “virtual” one. And for this reason, IronKey has just announced a partnership with Tresys Technology, following which the former's FIPS 140-2 Level 3 validated secure flash drives will be “injected” with the latter's FiST (File Sanitization Tool).

As some of you might know, the IronKey family of intelligent encrypted USB devices features always-on hardware encryption that safeguards the most sensitive data on the USB device, ensuring that only authorized individuals have access. IronKey's active malware defenses start with a trusted supply chain and maintain cleanliness with clean autorun protection, read-only mode and trusted network restrictions.

Tresys' FiST is an appliance-based kiosk that accesses a USB device and its data in a virtual, controlled and isolated environment to safely handle malicious content without the risk of infecting either the kiosk or other USB devices. FiST conducts deep content inspection and analysis and detects, removes and stores (for forensic analysis) malicious hidden content, viruses and malware from USB devices. In addition, the kiosk includes a simple, single-purpose user interface, secure erasure of USB devices and software for forensic capture.

"Combining IronKey and Tresys technologies provides a secure second source for validating that IronKey devices are free from malware," said Steve Ryan, senior vice president of business development at IronKey. "The risk of data compromise on the flash drive itself and the risk of introducing or propagating malicious instructions into an environment via a USB device are now obsolete and can be verified prior to any use on PC's and networks. With this integration of IronKey and Tresys, users can be completely assured and confident that it is safe to use IronKey devices to move data between highly secure computers and networks."

Of course, there's no word on whether this deal will increase the price of the IronKey flash drives; unfortunately, the answer is most likely an affirmative one.


We are just a few, but there are many of you, Softpedia users, out there. That's why we thought it would be a good idea to create an email address for you to help us a little in finding gadgets we missed. Interesting links are bound to be posted with recognition going mainly to those who submit. The address is .