It often requires numerous updates to keep up with hacking techniques, could be quite slow, and may require complex driver and software installations. Software encryption options are available on the market as a cheaper alternative to hardware encryption, but the disadvantages tend to outweigh the benefits.

Software Encryption is software based, where the encryption of a drive is provided by external software to secure the data. This would take a trillion machines, testing a billion keys per second, two billion years to uncover an AES-128 key.” įor encryption security on USB flash drives, hard drives and solid state drives, two types of encryption methods are available: Software Encryption or Hardware Encryption. To put it into perspective as one researcher at Leuven University puts it, “if a hacker were to attempt to “break the code” to gain access to an AES 128-bit encrypted flash drive, the number of steps he would have to take is an 8 followed by 37 zeros. Essentially, AES encryption is a block of algorithms that 'scrambles' the data into unreadable code for transport, then when reconnected to the user, is unscrambled again by the same algorithm when the right keys are provided.

There are different degrees of AES hardware encryption, for example 128-bit, 192-bit, and 256-bit, with each key size providing an increased level of protection and complexity. AES is a widely recognized and adapted cryptographic module used in the U.S., Canada and worldwide by military, government, financial institutions, and organizations all around the world as the standard for encrypting and decrypting of data.

AES stands for Advanced Encryption Standard, and is a specification standard by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for the security of data.

External storage encryption