Aloaha is a privately owned company with offices in Ibbenbueren, Germany. Their document and security products have been used extensively in various areas.
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Aloaha manufactures a range of secure USB flash drives in sizes ranging from 4 GB to 32 GB. All drives contain the same level of hardware smart card encryption and are structured with one partition holding an encrypted drive image for the secure area. It includes a portable version of Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, Password Safe (an account/password management software), and Tor along with anti-malware software.
One of the key design features of the Aloaha Secure Stick is a self-blocking mechanism which activates after the user enters his PIN incorrectly a certain number of consecutive times.
Another key feature is the capability to boot an encrypted OS directly from the stick if the Host OS supports booting from USB.
The inbuild Aloaha Smartcard Middleware (Aloaha Cardconnector) supports currently approx. 45 different smart cards.
The open source Tor anonymizer network is offering the end-users a secure and private web browsing by routing network traffic through a random selection of nodes.
Password Safe is a password management tool. The Password Safe stores the passwords of a user in a smart card encrypted format on the device, and connects to Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer, allowing automatic logins. This prevents malware from simply copying an account database off the device for a later attack. Passwords are only visible in memory for a matter of seconds while being populated onto the web form.
Aloaha Crypt is the hard drive encryption software responsible for the encryption of the stick.
All models of Aloaha share the same case design. Aloaha utilizes a strong outer casing to protect against physical damage, and the internal components are sealed with an epoxy-based potting compound to protect against tampering as well as increase waterproofing, along with increasing the device's strength. Additionally, there is a coating over the chipsets that senses any tampering by a change in the electrical impedance. It tends to be a bit larger and heavier than most current flash drives.
Aloaha Secure Stick (released in 2005) uses AES 256-bit CBC encryption together with smart card based RSA hardware encryption.
The supporting software is available to Microsoft Windows (specifically Windows 2000 SP4, Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7) users.
Omnikey/HID Global has partnered with Aloaha to produce the Aloaha Secure Stick.
Secure flash drives have become more common in recent years, following increases in reports of drives and laptops with confidential data being lost or stolen.[1][2][3][4] Most of the larger flash drive manufacturers have released similar products with varying feature sets; some of the more well known examples of which are:
A security flaw disclosed in January 2010 revealed that some Kingston, Sandisk, and Verbatim drives could be decrypted.[6][7] Sandisk and Verbatim both issued a software update to resolve the issue,[8][9] while Kingston offered to replace all affected devices.[10][11]
Alternatively, software based disk encryption systems can be used with any USB flash drive and provide practically equivalent functionality with higher security but at a significantly lower cost.