Virtualized USB Key: The Future of Online Banking?
Is this the future of online banking? US company IronKey has come up with a USB drive that can be used to access accounts virtually without involving the operating system or applications that cause so many of today’s security problems. Aimed at companies that want to protect corporate bank accounts, Trusted Access for Banking is actually a standard IronKey USB drive that runs a walled or ‘hardened’ Linux virtual environment inside the PC’s OS. It comes complete with its own browser hardwired to access only a particular bank service, and incorporates RSA Secure ID tokens for authentication. According to IronKey’s Dave Jevans, the PCs used for corporate bank access were now considered so insecure that companies were being lumbered with impractical remedies such as having to dedicate a specific PC to be used only for bank access. Using IronKey Trusted Access, companies could simply plug the drive into any PC, and without the need for any additional drivers or software, after which the hos
