©2022 Kingston Technology Corporation. All rights reserved. All trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
IronKey VP80ES External SSD User Manual
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Rev. 1.0
6
Your VP80ES comes with strong security countermeasures. This includes a Password Counter for invalid
password entries in a row that will stop an attacker guessing passwords and will wipe out the encrypted
data
–
formatting the VP80ES back to factory state. This is known as Brute Force Attack protection.
The VP80ES is designed to allow you to set up your password rules (such as Minimum Password Length)
on the Admin menu, along with whether numbers and/or alphabetic characters are required. This allows
you to set passwords that are secure yet easier to remember.
First, the VP80ES allows you to select two passwords
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an Administrator password (we will call it the
Admin password from here on) and a User password. Admin can access the drive at any time and set up
options for User
–
Admin is like a Super User.
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.
Second, the VP80ES supports two password modes. When password rules are selected by Admin, both
the Admin and the User passwords must comply with the set rules requiring at least one number and/or at
least one alphabet character. There are two password modes:
•
Numeric (or PIN)
: You can select 6-64 numbers as your password. This is like the PIN on
a mobile phone or bank card where you authenticate by selecting the numbers on a touch-
screen. In this case, alphabetic characters are not required in the password.
•
Alphanumeric (or Passphrase)
: As people have more and more Complex Passwords to
remember, it can get a bit complicated to track and remember. The VP80ES supports
Passphrases up to 64 characters.
A Passphrase is basically any combination of alphanumeric characters and the space key from a
minimum of 6 characters up to 64 characters. 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.
Examples of strong Passphrases:
•
ESPRESSO MILK SUGAR
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coffee recipe
•
RED YELLOW PURPLE
- colors
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2B OR NOT 2B
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Shakespeare poetry
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LET IT BE
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Song name
•
8 X 8 EQUALS 64
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Math
•
MY DOG IS 1 YEAR OLD
- Personal
The possibilities are endless. The ideal passphrase would have multiple words that are very difficult for an
attacker to guess. It should be meaningful to you.
Using the Admin and the User Passwords, you have two independent passwords. Kingston recommends
saving one in a safe location, just in case the other password is forgotten.
If both 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 VP80ES can be Secure Erased and reused, but the prior data will be erased
forever.
Use the Correct File System
The VP80ES comes preformatted with the exFAT file system. It will work on Windows and macOS
systems. However, there could be some other options, such as NTFS for Windows and others for
macOS. You can reformat the data partition if needed but data is lost when the drive is reformatted. See
Formatting Your VP80ES
for more information.
