Portable Keylogger detector

I am looking for a program that can be installed on a Secure Jump Drive? I have a Lexar 512 Secure Jump Drive with portable Firefox and Portable Thunderbird and a portable notepad and several other portable programs on it and use it
while traveling at Cyber cafes and while visting at homes or libraries
and would like to be assured that no key logging was being done. Any suggestions. Also how about a list of anti-virus programs and security programs that can be run from a jump drive or flash drive?

quickshot

 

Hi quickshot,

So far I can't find any "execute and run" Anti keyloggers or AV's, they would have to be installed which is not what you're looking for.

The best bet so far would be a bootable portable drive using BartPe or a Linux distro. In that case, you would be able to use almost anything.

Regards - Charles

 

Hi Quickshot,

A new application to look into:

http://www.techweb.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=193005719



Also found this http://acfwiki.pbwiki.com/NoInstallFreeware index of sites that catalog portable applications.

Regards - Charles

 

Thanks for the links, it will keep me busy looking and I do appreciate it. It looks like there are lots of interesting pprograms.

quickshot

 

Agree with Charles, and would expand a little. First, the only data, which is protected, is that which you indicate to be protected by the proprietary Lexar encryption program. I think software must be run from the public area of the "secure" drive.

Any program that can be copied to a CD and run can be similarly copied to the flash drive and run. Otherwise, there is no such thing as a "portable program ". Basically, a program that is contained in a single folder (and its subfolders) and does not require parts elsewhere on the system, such as the registry or .dlls in system folders, can qualify.

Some antivirus and antispyware programs can qualify, such as spybotS&D. You can copy the program folder from your computer, where it's installed, to the flash drive and run it from there on any compatible machine. I carry a CD with the installation programs, much smaller than the installed folders, that I wish to use and install the programs on the computer to be protected, but that of course requires an administrative account, which you probably won't have. The portion of free AVG that runs in DOS is also good, but you must reinstall it with the upgraded definitions each time it's used, easy on a flash drive if you also carry a DOS boot drive with USB drivers; a ghost boot CD or floppy works well.

Most of your protection will be whatever software is already installed on the computer in which you use the flash drive. If it's your laptop, you're in control, and shouldn't worry about putting programs on the flash drive since they aren't more secure there.

Since any AV or A-spy program you run from the flash drive will probably conflict with a similar program already started by the host, the whole idea is questionable.

 

charlesvar

That MojoPac software is interesting but apparently not available yet. (Almost?) any program running from a flash drive is running on the host computer's OS - and MojoPac is - and therefore subject to all security risks to which the host is subject, isn't it? So if the host is infected, isn't the flash drive subject to infection also? At least its unencrypted (public) portion, where the programs are likely to be. AV and A-spy progs will need updating on the host also, and going online will use the host's OS.

Booting from certain CDs, like Linux, eliminates the host OS completely, and I believe it is possible to boot from a flash drive in certain computers (if the bios is accessible to fix boot order) but I haven't done it On one of our computers, without an internal floppy, we can boot from an external USB floppy. However, without drivers for the hardware of a strange machine, it will be difficult to use such things as the NIC or the graphics card.

Storing data in the encrypted area of the flash drive must be done from memory, of course, and in an infected computer, the infection may be encrypted on the flash drive along with the data, and carried to other machines.

 

Hi sparrow,

Yep, that's the problem. That's why using a bootable drive with Linux is the best bet so far, and as you pointed out, the host system's BIOS has to have the option of booting from an external drive. I have no experience doing that at all.

From what I'm gathering from the writeup, at least implicitly, is that it has to be bootable, so can run independent of the host. Whether that gets around any host system malware remains to be seen.

Regards - Charles

 

Thanks for all the replies and I am learning a lot of new things that have now helped me relize that I am not as secure as I though I was.

quickshot