Hardware-Level Security

Hardware-based encryption systems can be vulnerable to brute-force attacks if they store a counter in the flash memory. The attacker simply rewinds the counter after every attempt. It is then only a matter of time before the system is cracked. To mitigate such a threat, the IronKey uses a separate cryptographic processor (the IronKey Cryptochip) with its own internal password guessing counter. This counter is not stored in the flash memory, so is not vulnerable to memory rewind attacks.