Does anyone actually trust these products? Always seemed like a terrible idea to me. The correct solution is to use free software cryptography on top of these things.
I've been required to use similar products due to government regulations. Personally I never trusted them, and I would have loved to take 15 minutes poking around in them, but it was the government who mandated their use for their data so ultimately it was out of my hands.
Was it probably a IronKey? They had a Homeland Security grant, I've used one then.
To me software had some advantages. Easy backup of the encrypted data without a dependency to the hardware. IIRC this was somehow solved on the IronKey. Not a black box for the user which have to trust.
My main problem with a software solution for me is the entry of the password which I have to do on a probably compromised computer.
The original IronKey (later sold to Kingston) seems to have be cracked.
A team / company called Unciphered managed to break a IronKey in a attempt to offer such a decryption to Stefan Thomas who had 7002 bitcoin on this key.
This was then worth then 235 million dollar (now >500 million), which is of course a VERY strong motivation. [1]
The Lenovo case of course seems not to be bad implemented security but no security at all, especially if they advertise with encryption, which I found on a Asian Lenovo website where still there are still some specs of the key [2].
A good method if you want to damage your reputation.
The overwhelming majority of people who use USB sticks for things are likely aware of security and the concept of encryption. But the idea of being able to use “free software cryptography on top” may as well be a trip to Mars.
Most "normies" I know think that open source cryptography is less secure because it's "open" (if they even know open source cryptography is a thing at all). No amount of trying to explain to them how more eyes on the source code generally equals safer encryption will sway most of them in the slightest.
>The correct solution is to use free software cryptography on top of these things.
If implemented correctly, "hardware" encryption can be more secure than "free software cryptography". The most obvious benefit is protection against brute-attacks, which you can't meaningfully implement with software. Not to mention added protection of biometric authentication as a second factor, compared to typing a password into a possibly untrusted machine.
You're not gonna remember a AES256 key either (or at least not many of them), not to mention the ergonomics associated with entering a AES256 key. The whole point of security chips like google's titan m2 or apple's secure enclave is to strengthen weak passwords (eg. 6 digit pins) so they offer comparable security to 256 bit keys, without having to enter 256 bit keys.
“Correctly” is a big caveat. Almost no HW implementation is auditable in any way.
My baseline assumption is that even the good commercial products are only secure from a non-determined attacker, not TLAs. Anything safe from TLAs is what’s being sold only to them.
If you own an Android device, your disk encryption is most likely provided via a UFS/eMMC hardware component known as the "Inline Cryptographic Engine" (ICE). Reputable device manufacturers validate the ciphertext that these devices write out to storage in a test environment by running the plaintext through a software encryption process using the same encryption keys as the OS provides to the ICE. If the ciphertexts match, then it would be unlikely that the hardware encryption engine isn't doing its job right.
>Anything safe from TLAs is what’s being sold only to them.
I think you're overestimating how much backdoors there are in products vs actual bugs. As we've seen with with recent vulnerability disclosures, there's plenty of bugs that were put there unintentionally.
Software is insecure in many scenarios because endpoint security is abysmal. Of course, a USB stick with fingerprint reader cannot be secure but there is no way around hardware-based cryptography with independent key entry if you need real security. Then again, this won't help you if the secrets are transferred to the insecure endpoint anyway.
The issue with AI-produced text is rarely bad grammar these days (if anything, that's a marker of human-written text now!), but rather stiff-sounding constructions that humans don't actually use. In this case — semicolons are grammatically correct, but very few people actually use them them (same for em-dashes like what I just used, but you can pry them from my cold, dead fingers).
How much hardware and even software that is supposedly used for encryption is actually backdoored?
We know that Microsoft's bitlocker had at least one backdoor. Lenovo's fingerprint USB also has backdoors.
It seems like only open source solutions actually provide encryption, like LUKS and Veracrypt. Then again, who guarantees that the executables are actually build from the source? Or that the keys aren't somehow sent over to agencies by the operating system?
TLDR, we cannot realistically trust anything in this dictatorship of mass surveillance.
>We know that Microsoft's bitlocker had at least one backdoor
Source? The closest I found was microsoft's key escrow system, but that's hardly a "backdoor" given it's publicly documented, and it's explicitly stated in no uncertain terms when you're setting it up[1]
Look up YellowKey. Specifically crafted NTFS transaction logs would unlock any Bitlocker drive with transparent encryption. Some people believe it was an intentional backdoor, kind of a debated topic.
Which even microsoft admits is basically a LARP from a security point of view. It's better than nothing, but it's not meant to stand up against serious attacks. Even without the yellowkey exploit, it can be bypassed via interposer attacks on the TPM.
Just use veracrypt or ecrypt on any memory card. These devices don't deserve the premium they charge for on-device encryption which in this case is not even encyrypted
Didn't expect something this crazy but I will not trust stuff like this until I've seen a teardown. Imagine being the product manager who approved this shit
The original IronKey (later sold to Kingston) seems to have be cracked. A team / company called Unciphered managed to break a IronKey in a attempt to offer such a decryption to Stefan Thomas who had 7002 bitcoin on this key. This was then worth then 235 million dollar (now >500 million), which is of course a VERY strong motivation. [1]
The Lenovo case of course seems not to be bad implemented security but no security at all, especially if they advertise with encryption, which I found on a Asian Lenovo website where still there are still some specs of the key [2]. A good method if you want to damage your reputation.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/unciphered-ironkey-password-crac...
[2] https://tk.lenovo.com.cn/product/1003497.html
If implemented correctly, "hardware" encryption can be more secure than "free software cryptography". The most obvious benefit is protection against brute-attacks, which you can't meaningfully implement with software. Not to mention added protection of biometric authentication as a second factor, compared to typing a password into a possibly untrusted machine.
if you have a bad password that's a user issue
My baseline assumption is that even the good commercial products are only secure from a non-determined attacker, not TLAs. Anything safe from TLAs is what’s being sold only to them.
I think you're overestimating how much backdoors there are in products vs actual bugs. As we've seen with with recent vulnerability disclosures, there's plenty of bugs that were put there unintentionally.
"How did you get the data?"
"It was just an unencrypted SD card inside"
Not very exciting, but I guess just as accurate as reality!
(You actually have to go through https://binary.ninja/2026/10/22/breaking-more-encrypted-usb-... first :))
> The fingerprint only switched the USB connection on; nothing on the card was encrypted.
We know that Microsoft's bitlocker had at least one backdoor. Lenovo's fingerprint USB also has backdoors.
It seems like only open source solutions actually provide encryption, like LUKS and Veracrypt. Then again, who guarantees that the executables are actually build from the source? Or that the keys aren't somehow sent over to agencies by the operating system?
TLDR, we cannot realistically trust anything in this dictatorship of mass surveillance.
Source? The closest I found was microsoft's key escrow system, but that's hardly a "backdoor" given it's publicly documented, and it's explicitly stated in no uncertain terms when you're setting it up[1]
[1] https://static0.howtogeekimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/upl...
I'm not 100% certain either way.
Which even microsoft admits is basically a LARP from a security point of view. It's better than nothing, but it's not meant to stand up against serious attacks. Even without the yellowkey exploit, it can be bypassed via interposer attacks on the TPM.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/operating...