Before you contact the technical assistance staff, we kindly suggest that you first check the Frequently Asked Questions and the User Manuals. We find that the vast majority of our customers' questions are already addressed and answered in those two documental resources.

The GhostPen™ customer service can be accessed from the following web link: www.ghostpen.eu/support/.

You can contact the GhostPen™ technical support also by sending an email to: support@ghostpen.eu describing clearly the problem you are having, providing the steps to replicate it and including information on the PC operating system, serial and size of USB device and the version of the e-Capsule™ application you are using.

e-Capsule™ employs a combination of symmetric and asymmetric encryption algorithms to protect data and information both in transport and in storage. The RSA asymmetric keys used are 2048 bits long. RSA quotes that it would take about 3,000,000 years to break a 1024-bit key. However, a mathematical analysis paper recently published describes how a computer can be built that could break 1024-bit RSA encryption in seconds to minutes. Although the cost of such a computing effort is beyond the reach of most individuals and smaller corporations, it is well within the reach of large corporations and governments. Therefore, RSA keys that are 2048 bits long are now usually required and are rated as espionage strength.

The previous asymmetric encryption is combined with the latest government approved (FIPS 197) symmetric encryption algorithm - AES - at it's strongest implementation - 256 bit. The AES is a cryptographic algorithm that was very recently approved by the US National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) as a replacement for the Data Encryption Standard (DES) which had been approved for the encryption of financial information since the late 1970’s. In fact, in the late 1990’s DES was felt by many experts to be vulnerable to brute force attack by specialized computing machines.

NIST held a public competition for a replacement, and a number of algorithms were proposed. One entrant, Rijndael (now known as AES), was selected above the others and has been recommended as suitable for protecting computer information at the government and federal level. Assuming that one could build a machine that could recover a DES key in a second (i.e., to try 2⁵⁵ keys per second), then it would take that machine approximately 149 thousand-billion (149 trillion) years to crack a 128-bit AES key. To put that into perspective, the universe is believed to be less than 20 billion years old! Barring any attacks against AES that are faster than key exhaustion, then even with future advances in technology, AES has the potential to remain secure well beyond twenty years.

There is no such thing as unbreakable security.

In fact, all security systems can eventually fail, in some way or another. The key question to ask is not whether a security scheme or product is unbreakable, but what happens when something does go wrong and fails.

The e-Capsule™ products are designed to achieve the highest levels of confidentiality and to implement effective fault-tolerant procedures. Priority has been given to safeguarding the data's confidentiality and integrity over its availability, which greatly depends also on external components, such as the USB device and the PC. In other words, we have strived to assure that your data will never be disclosed without your authorization, even after severe product failures.

Furthermore, the e-Capsule™ interface is the result of extensive usability studies, maximizing ease of use while maintaining the highest levels of security available today in the industry.

A Passphrase is a string of characters much longer than a usual password (which is typically from 4 to 8 characters long). Your e-Capsule™ passphrase can be up to 255 characters long, may contain any character (including spaces and symbols) and is case sensitive. We suggest choosing a long passphrase, such as an expression you remember easily but that cannot be easily identified by others (e.g. the first lines of a poem you’ve learned in college could be fine, but your home address would not be a good choice). If you decide to use a short passphrase avoid dictionary words and always include also symbols (such as numbers, spaces and punctuation).

The advantage of using a passphrase is that it enables you to choose a long string as your login credential (something like: “Yesterday I had a great time at the basketball game!”), which is easy for you to remember but very hard for others to guess or even just to sneak while you’re typing it. A good passphrase delivers stronger access security than a standard password without the need to change it very often.