How PCKey Works

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How PCKey Works

PCKey works by encrypting the entire data on your hard drive irrespective of the physical or logical partitions. The encrypted data is scrambled information that cannot be decoded without the user being authenticated. The authentication process requires the user to use both the USB key and password to decrypt the data.

All data on the hard drive stays encrypted until it is requested by an application. The encrypted data passes through the active PC Key filter and is decrypted on the fly to be stored in the computer's system memory for the application use. All data that is written back to the hard drive is encrypted on the fly as it passes through the PC Key filter and stays encrypted until it is requested by an application.

PCKey uses two different methods to ensure total security:

Access control
Data protection

1). Access control:

Access control is accomplished by 2-factor authentication. Strong 2-factor authentication requires two specific identifiers.

The most common example of 2-factor authentication is an ATM machine. The only way by which an account holder can access their bank account via the ATM machine is by using an ATM card (factor 1) and a PIN number (factor 2). Both factors are required at the same time to access the account.

Similarly to decrypt computer data that has been encrypted by PCKey the user needs to use the USB key (factor 1) and password (factor 2) together. Since passwords alone are easily compromised and are widely regarded as the weakest link in any given security system, 2-factor authentication ensures that only authorized users having both the USB key and password can access the data.

2). Data protection

The encryption process encodes the data in a manner that can only be decoded by the user having access to the secret key. The most common encryption strengths are 40-bit, 64-bit and 128 bit with the higher strengths offering greater levels of security. Data protection in PCKey security solution uses 128 bit AES encryption to accomplish the greatest level of security.