Kingston Technology IRONKEY Vault Privacy 50, Installation Manual

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6
Best Practices for Password Setup
Your VP50 comes with strong security countermeasures. This includes protection against Brute Force attacks that will
stop an attacker guessing passwords by limiting each password attempt to 10 retries. When
the drive’s limit is
reached, VP50 will automatically wipe out the encrypted data – formatting itself back to a factory state.
Multi-Password
VP50 supports Multi-Passwords as a major feature to help protect against data loss if one or more passwords are
forgotten. When all password options are enabled, the VP50 can support three different passwords you may use to
recover data
– Admin, User, and a One-Time Recovery password .
VP50 allows you to select two main passwords – an Administrator password (referred to as Admin password) and a
User password. Admin can access the drive at any time and set up options for User – Admin is like a Super User. In
addition, Admin can set up the One-Time Recovery password for User to provide a way for User to log in and reset
the User password.
User can access the drive as well but compared to Admin has limited privileges. If one of the two passwords is
forgotten, the other password can be used to access and retrieve the data. The drive can then be set back up to have
two passwords. It is important to set up BOTH passwords and save the Admin password in a safe location while using
the User password. User can use the One-Time Recovery password in order to reset the User password when needed.
If all passwords are forgotten or lost, there is no other way to access the data. Kingston will not be able to retrieve
the data as the security has no back doors. Kingston recommends that you have the data also saved on other media.
The VP50 can be Reset and reused, but the prior data will be erased forever.
Password Modes
The VP50 also supports two different password modes:
Complex
A complex password requires to meet a minimum of 6-16 characters using at least 3 of the following characters:
•
Upper case alphabet characters
•
Lower case alphabet characters
•
Numbers
•
Special characters
Passphrase
VP50 supports Passphrases from 10 to 64 characters. A Passphrase follows no rules, but if used properly, can provide
very high levels of password protection.
A Passphrase is basically any combination of characters, including characters from other languages. Like the VP50
drive, the password language can match the language selected for the drive. This allows you to select multiple words,
a phrase, lyrics from a song, a line from poetry, etc. Good passphrases are among the most difficult password types
to guess for an attacker yet may be easier to remember for users.