ThumbDrive offers fingerprint data protection

Tuesday July 29, 2003

ThumbDrive Touch is a plug-and-play portable USB storage device that uses fingerprint authentication to prevent unauthorised access to your data. In addition to recognising the users' fingerprint, the Thumbdrive can be configured to grant access to three other people and can be partitioned to reserve space for secure data and open data.

Available in 16MB, 32MB, 64MB and 128MB versions, the Thumbdrive Touch doesn't offer the greatest capacity on the market but given the types of files that are likely to require confidentiality - financial and accounting data, personnel files and legal documents for example - capacity isn't likely to be a huge issue and the sizes available are ample.

We have long subscribed to the convenience of portable storage devices at Gizmo and found the enhanced security features of the ThumbDrive Touch, particularly the ability to authorise secondary users, a useful addition to standard portable drive functionality.

The small, lightweight drive (30g) is easy to set-up with the protection Window interface that reads your fingerprint appearing when you plug it in. Other operations are as per conventional devices.

Data can be stored on the ThumbDrive for up to ten years according to the manufacturers.

The TREK ThumbDrive Touch 16 MB version costs AUD$160.00 and the 128 MB version costs AUD$465.00. See www.thumbdrive.com.au for further information and distribution info.

Biometric security based on fingerprints is emerging as a key feature on other hardware devices such as keyboards, and iris-recognition is also being used for building security in Australia. Gizmo will examine some of these new applications for Biometrics more closely over coming weeks - stay tuned for further details.