Patent attributes
A dongle for ciphering, receiving and transmitting data to and from an external device is provided. The dongle includes a user interface configured to receive authentication data to confirm an identity of a user. The dongle is disabled for ciphering data unless an authorised user is identified. A data transfer channel is configured to couple the dongle to the external device to receive and transmit user data between the dongle and the external device. A hardware encryption engine is configured to perform a ciphering transformation on user data received from the external device. The dongle is configured to perform a return transmission to return the user data that has been transformed to the external device via the data transfer channel in real-time using a single data transfer channel without storage of the user data on the dongle.