Protect contents of USB to be copied

Question

We have a application, which uses some contents developed using flash, PPT, stored into file system.

We are distributing this application to end customer using USB drive, so we want to protect the contents of USB, so that no one can copy it.

But our java application should be able to access those contents.

I was thinking for building a small java application using JackRabbit content management system, and all contents will be in encrypted form using JackRabbit.

I have also checked some tools like, All in one protector. which writes content into CD/USB using there own writer, and it requires there player to open all our contents, which we do not want.

Answer 1

If you need to send sensitive data to your customer across non-secure channel (USB that can be accessed by a third party), then you need to use some form of asymmetric encryption with public/private key pairs (e.g. RSA). Encode the file content with the public key of your customer and it won't be possible to decode it without the private key.

Answer 2

I think that you can't really do that. I'm explaining: you always can develop a little program to detect the USB and read all bytes that it has. This can produce a copy at the moment. The advantage for you of this is that this kind of programs can be difficult to create, but it's possible.

In fact, if you want "protect" the USB, you can use a lot of programs to alterate the index of the files of USB, but it's highly easy to hack.

Sorry, but in my opinion, the USB is the worst kind of storage to distributing permanently data.