Patent ID: 8683232

Claim:
An apparatus, comprising: a portable digital data storage device with a storage peripheral interface connecting to a computer, including: a cipher key generation subsystem generating at least two independent cipher key components; a cipher using at least the two independent cipher key components to perform data encryption and data decryption; an authentication subsystem; a non-volatile data storage available to the computer connected to the interface, the non-volatile data storage including: a first part storing encrypted user data; and a second part storing meta-data used by a controller for authentication and cipher key generation; and the controller configuring: (i) the cipher to perform decryption of the encrypted user data of the first part of the non-volatile data storage into user data, and forward the user data to the computer, (ii) the cipher to perform encryption of the user data from the computer and forward the encrypted data to the non-volatile data storage, (iii) the authentication subsystem to authenticate at least two independent credentials including at least a computer signature of the computer connected to the interface and a user credential of a user of the computer connected to the portable storage device, and (iv) the cipher key generation subsystem to retrieve at least the two independent cipher key components using at least the two independent credentials.