Anybody have any experience of what is good, bad & totally secure – or at least good enough its not worth people trying to crack it?

We use them a lot!
Safe sticks are cheap and have the ability to wipe and start again if user forgets the password.

We also have Iron Keys which are expensive and do not have the wipe and start again functionality. But may be a little bit more secure. I doubt anyone would crack the safe stick though.

What are you referring to here? Encrypted storage?

Cougar – either encrypted storage or a USB dongle that is sufficiently secure that it can be used for carrying passwords etc & if it thinks it is trying to be hacked with multiple password attempts will shut down / erase etc.

I would prefer to only have to remember one password – if everywebpage I use has different passwords then all I have to do is remember the dongle one & look up others as I need them.

Also any confidential stuff can be kept on there.

any old usb stick and truecrypt?

Right. Wasn’t sure if you were talking about WiFi / 3G type devices or not.

I’d probably just get a regular old pendrive and Truecrypt it, TBH. There’s plenty of password keeper type programs out there too (just make sure you have a backup of the database).

As for website passwords, how about creating a password based on the URL using an algorithm only you know? Eg, have a base password (say $fred123), then take the first three letters of the domain name (so here would be ‘sin’), put them through a ceasar cypher (one letter right would give us ‘tjo’) and then add them into the base somewhere (giving us $fredtjo123, or o$frjed1t23, or whatever).

Can be as complex as you want, gives you unique per-site passwords, and you can work out the password in your head without needing to write them all down.

Cheers, I will look into truecrypt etc & start thinking of algorithms

For website usernames/passwords just use LastPass. No need to remember algorithms as it can create secure one’s on the fly. Just login with one master password per session and you’re away.

Great bit of software.

And for the USB yep use Truecrypt. The only issue is that you need to have admin privelages on the machine to mount the truecrypt volume. So if they’re your own machines then it’s all cool.

the only thing we can use here are the kingston datatraveller vaults. They mount as a cdrom drive until you run the encryption utility to start up the encrypted partition. Work well, but they’re pricey