password protection on usb flash drive?

[steven9d3]

if there a way to make my flash drive have a password on it?

Thanks

 

[dndlnx]

Disc Utility can do stuff like that. I've never done an entire USB drive, I'm guessing you can't.


But, you could use it to basically make a little protected "filesystem", and keep it on the drive. Just bundle up your sensitive stuff into a folder and make a 128-bit AES Read/Write DMG. It will only mount with your password.

Not exactly what you wanted, but it's the next best thing.

 

[jbuk]

Providing you're running Lion and your USB stick is formatted as Journaled HFS+; then you can convert it to a CoreStorage volume and encrypt it with filevault:

1. Open the terminal and type diskutil list, press return, and find the identifier that corresponds with your device you wish to encrypt (it will be in the form disk0s0).
2. Type diskutil coreStorage convert disk0s0 -stdinpassphrase, where disk0s0 is the identifier of the device you want to encrypt. You will get a prompt to enter the passphrase you want to encrypt the device with, do so, and then you will need to wait while diskutil does its thing. Depending on the amount of data currently on the device, you may need to wait a while for the data to be encrypted in the background.

On my test 1 GB USB stick, the core storage headers took up about 300 MB, so probably a much better idea would be to create an encrypted disk image at the root of the drive and just store everything on that.

 

[OldSchoolMacGuy]

Note that creating this encrypted disk image with Lion will make it un-openable with Snow Leopard and vise versa thanks to the changes Apple has made to FileVault with the release of FileVault 2 in Lion.

 

[Fank]

usbguy - thanks for the link

 

[John T]

I use SecureFiles to create secure, password protected images. I've found it a lot quicker and easier to use than Disc Utility. And it's free