Preventing people from using own USB sticks?

You would need some authentification between the stick and the operating system.

Since the stick is a totally passive device I doubt it will be that easy. Let's see: the only way you can do auth is putting some files on the stick and maybe fiddle around with the device identification values (vendor, product id, etc.).
All of this is clonable. You can copy files and filesystem on the stick and you can probably also clone the indent vals (e.g. by getting an identical stick).

So nothing of this is particularly safe. You could get some custom-made USB sticks which contain auth hw, and only let you access the data storage after auth is completed. That's of course not going to work with regular sticks you use to buy

That's probably what Shin's company did. However I see more problems coming when implementing this. First of all you can't have identical auth data on all devices, since you want to precisely enable/disable devices when a stick gets e.g. lost. Disabling all devices isn't an option... at least if we're talking about a bigger amount of sticks. Then you need to distribute auth data to the clients (the machines that should accept the stick) safely, plus avoiding that anyone toys around with the auth data on their machine.

That's a whole bunch of non-trivial problems...

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