Aloaha

Aloaha is a privately owned company with offices in Ibbenbueren, Germany. They market document and security products.

Overview

Aloaha manufactures secure USB flash drives in sizes ranging from four 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 design features of the Aloaha Secure Stick is a self-blocking mechanism which activates after the user enters the PIN incorrectly a certain number of consecutive times.

Another feature is the capability to boot an encrypted OS directly from the stick if the host OS supports booting from USB.

Bundled software

The inbuilt Aloaha Smartcard Middleware (Aloaha Cardconnector) supports 45 different smart cards.

The open source Tor anonymizer network offers 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.

Hardware

All models of Aloaha share the same case design. Aloaha uses 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.

Supported smart cards

Encryption

Aloaha Secure Stick (released in 2005) uses AES 256-bit CBC encryption together with smart card based RSA hardware encryption.

Operating system support

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.

Partnerships

Omnikey/HID Global has partnered with Aloaha to produce the Aloaha Secure Stick.

See also

References

    External links