Flash drives inherently grant users both unrestricted read and write privilege but such access rights may not be practical for vertical market applications.

For instance, Industrial Control System Flash Drive systems are mostly offline or air-gapped for security reasons. Updating firmware and patches for these critical infrastructures, therefore, relies on the use of direct-attached storage (e.g. flash drives). Off-the-shelf drives will not suffice as they don’t guarantee data security against sabotage. In such cases, companies would want a peace-of-mind solution to meet their security requirements of dispatching read-only drives.

Honeywell recently released a cybersecurity report claiming that 37% of threats were specifically designed to utilize removable media, which almost doubled from 19% in 2020. This number could be drastically reduced when the proper media and solution are used.

For example, there are various non-permanent methods to secure flash drives, including changing read-only attributes with DISKPART through command utility as well as manually setting drive security rights from Windows. These methods get the job done for the average user – although not a significant hurdle for the more determined wanting to take advantage and wreak havoc.

Said another way, these steps will not stop a user with unsupervised access from reverting the drive write permission back to the original state and doing whatever they want with the data. A hardware solution is regarded as a more foolproof solution because hacking into the machine code of a chip is more difficult than hacking into software code. Nexcopy has a hardware solution called Lock License and it addresses the needs of medical and industrial control system cybersecurity concerns.

The overview is Nexcopy’s Lock License working similar to a write-once-read-many (WORM) solution. The solution provides device integrity by having a default state of read-only mode. Yet Nexcopy gives the user the ability to temporarily remove the write protection in a controlled manner. For Lock License, the core component is the custom-coded chip firmware that provides configurable security options.