Ask HN: How do you secure/encrypt your USB stick?

2 points by unnawut 8 years ago | 1 comment

Following recent news about a USB stick with airport security plans was lost and found unencrypted (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15588408), a few commenters were surprised that the USB was unencrypted.

Given how USB sticks are usually meant to be portable and plugged into different machines, possibly different OSes or installed programs. This makes it realitively more cumbersome in terms of usability for encrypted USB sticks. And I believe this is the biggest reason why people do not encrypt their USB sticks.

Since all discussions I found about encrypted were years ago with few comments, I would like to ask HN what is your preferred way to keep your USB encrypted/secured?

nbernard 8 years ago |

I'm using Linux (mostly) both at work and home. I encrypt my USB sticks (actually, micro-SD cards) using LUKS (initial setup with 'cryptsetup -v luksFormat -y --cipher aes-xts-plain64 --key-size 512 /dev/disk' then I create a ext4 filesystem and add them in /etc/crypttab and /etc/fstab on computers where I will use them frequently).

For the rare times where I need an access from Windows, there are programs allowing that ( https://github.com/t-d-k/LibreCrypt ). Moreover, for instance at a friend's when I only need one file, I have a Raspberry Pi zero configured as an Ethernet USB Gadget running the Interlock front-end ( https://github.com/inversepath/interlock ), giving access through a Web browser (I'm considering replacing the Raspberry Pi zero by an Orange Pi Zero, to be able to use Ethernet and Wifi connections too).