We all have them by now (for God’s sake, even my dad has one), but they’re usually not very secure. Sure, my little Philips 2 Gig stick survived a run in the washing machine inside my jeans the other week, but lose it and your data is normally up for grabs.

IronKey has realeased what they are calling “the world’s most secure USB flash drive”. It comes in three sizes (1, 2 and 4 Gig) and looks like what you’d expect. But the fun is on the inside: it sports hardware-based military-grade AES encoding, so anything you put on there is immediately encoded by the on-board chip, and is filled with an epoxy compound to protect its innards. But get this: the crypto chip actually self-destructs if it senses that it’s being tampered with (and that’s a hardware self-destruct, not software). Mission Impossible, anyone?

The Personal version also comes with some onboard software, including a hardened version of Mozilla Firefox so you can use that to surf safely via IronKey’s Tor-based Secure Sessions proxy. How cool is that?

It also comes with a password manager and an on-line backup utility so that when you zap one IronKey all you have to do is buy a new one and the encrypted data can be downloaded back to your new drive (all encrypted, so even IronKey employees can’t see into your data).

I wonder if I can convince my boss I want gotta have need this to look cool for work…