Re: protection on IoMega ZIP drives

[jpb@miamisci.org (Joe Block)]

re:
>This is in regard to the now popular ZIP disks, the removable 100MB
>cartridge for PC's/MAC's.
>
>Anyone have any idea how secure the ZIP disk is once it is "protected?"  I
>know that the disk will refuse to be mounted without the passkey, but what
>is really happening here?

In my experience (on a Mac) the Zip doesn't get any slower once protected
so I expect it is probably some mickeymouse bit that gets set somewhere,
and the Iomega driver simply refuses to mount the disk.  I don't think
Linux would even blink before mounting the purportedly "protected" volume.

If you're concerned about securing your carts, I recommend creating a
CryptDisk file on the Mac disk.  I don't use DOS/Windows, so I can't
suggest anything for that, but I'm sure someone else on the list will jump
in.  Matt Blaze recently posted an announcement of a new release of his
secure filesystem for unix to the list, which I believe also runs under
Linux.


Joseph Block <jpb@miamisci.org>

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