Secret plans for world domination can be a burden: not only do they take a long while to draft up and revise, but they also are a hassle to keep from prying eyes.

But if you need to keep your secrets secret, this new storage method may be for you: its called the IronKey, and it brings a new level of security to thumb drives. Currently seeing active duty in Afghanistan and possibly elsewhere, the IronKey almost looks like your everyday metal-encased USB thumb drive, but there is much more than meets the eye.

For starters, the IronKey has a hardware encryption chip. Passwords are locked up safe in a hardware based password manager, that is generated with a military-grade 256-bit AES block cypher, using randomly generated keys from a SHA-256 hash function designed by the National Security Agency. Data is further treated to a double layer of 128-bit AES hardware encryption. I'm no cryptologist, but this, I assure you, is a whole lot of encryption. Furthermore, if 10 wrong passwords are ever used with the IronKey, the thumb drive's encryption chip self-destructs. How about that? 

This nifty water-proof thumb drive has protection from physical hacking attempts as well. The drive is filled with an epoxy, so if it is opened up, it is likely to epoxy-ify itself into data oblivion. The memory chips are also electron-shielded, so even if you had, say, a scanning electron microscope, you wouldn't have much luck getting at your sensitive data. The IronKey also has a built-in, encryption-secured Firefox web browser that uses a VPN tunnel to route communications through a Secure Sessions Service proxy that anonymizes your Internet surfing, that protects -- and onces again encrypts -- your activities.

So if you were putting off making those world domination plans because of insecure thumb drives, now you have no excuse. The IronKey is available through ThinkGeek, and is between $78.99 and $148.99 (depending on the capacity of the drive.) However, this product is only available to North Americans, due to export restrictions.