It seems like the benefits are having the device lock/wipe itself after a set amount of attempts in case of a brute force attack and not having to run software to decrypt the drive on the device you plug it into.
I included a picture of the IronKey Keypad 200 but that’s just because it’s the first result that came up when I was looking for an example. There seem to be a few other manufacturers and models out there and they probably have different features.
I am curious what do you think of them? Do you think they are useful? Do you find it more a novelty?
It was an ExplainingComputers video titled Very Useful Small Computing Things that made me think of them.
Nice just look at the most worn buttons
It still drastically narrows down the search space and makes social engineering a LOT easier.
Because you tend to have one of two sources for any password that people need to remember.
- Randomly generated with no rhyme or reason. And written down on a sticky note as a result
- Something with meaning to the user
And it is the latter where this becomes an issue. Because let’s say they are a 50 year old and 1, 4, 6, 7, and 9 are heavily worn. Well, they were born in the 70s so let’s verify exactly when. Hmm, May. No 5 means it probably isn’t their birthday. Wait… their partner was born on April 7th, 1976. No luck. Oh, but what if they were clever and it is actually 197647 instead of 471976? Boom, in.
Related XKCD
It’s a shame more people don’t think of obscure numbers they’ve been forced to remember in the past or see constantly and use those.
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A number from a song
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Your middle school locker combination
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The number of a local pizza place
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Your library card number
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The barcode number on something you carry around all the time
If you combined any two of those I imagine it would make for a pretty secure password.
Ironkey has been more careful than some other vendors but the concept still seems dubious to me, if you are trying to stop serious attackers. You want the decryption key to be completely separated from the storage.
Ironkey has been more careful than some other vendors
In what aspects? I don’t know much about these specific devices
Cryptography and tamper resistance implementation. E.g. search “ironkey fips certification”. Ironkey is a Kingston brand now though, and Kingston has traditionally been crap, so be careful. Anyway if it’s for run of the mill personal files where you just want some extra protection, the device is probably ok if you don’t mind the semi-ridiculous cost. This is interesting though: https://www.wired.com/story/unciphered-ironkey-password-cracking-bitcoin/
Also a teardown report: https://hardwear.io/netherlands-2021/presentation/teardown-and-feasibility-study-of-IronKey.pdf
There are more serious technical approaches to data protection, but fairly quickly the weak spot becomes the humans in the loop, which are harder to handle with pure technology.
I was going to suggest an attack similar to what I’d assume the guys in your link achieved—the actual data on the flash chip can be dumped easily, so if you can figure out the encryption algorithm used, you don’t need a whole lot of computational power to brute force a 15 digit numeric key (a couple of high end GPUs would probably get you there in an hour or so) and decrypt the dumped data.
Does this matter if it needs a password? Luks stores the key in storage too
If I understand Luks, the raw key is encrypted using the passphrase, so that is an ok scheme if the passphrase itself is too random to attack by brute force (unlike the 8 digit code that the Ironkey device uses). Look up “diceware” for a reasonable way to generate random phrases. Luks with this approach can be pretty good, though still potentially vulnerable to key loggers and other such attacks. Basically, put careful attention into what you are trying to protect against. High security commercial crypto (e.g. for banking) uses hardware modules in secure data centers, surrounded by 24/7 video surveillance. Check out the book “Security Engineering” by Ross Anderson if this sort of thing interests you. 1st and 2nd editions are on his website, use web search. Parts of the current 3rd edition are there too).
Do encryption in software. History taught us hard lessons about this.
Can you think of some notable examples of hardware based encryption failing?
Besides the actual device dying I mean
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://m.piped.video/watch?v=beMtNM7nwfQ
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
The downside with doing encryption in software is that you can’t limit attempts. If you are using a high-entropy key this is fine. But getting users to use high-entropy keys has problems. If there is an HSM integrated into the device you can limit the potential guesses before the key is wiped which is critical without high-entropy keys.
A blog I follow recently had a good post about this: https://words.filippo.io/dispatches/secure-elements/
Of course you are still better off with a high-entropy key and software. But if you trade off too much usability in the name of security you will likely find that your users/employees just work around the security.
That mitigates the problem but doesn’t solve it. If you want unlocking to be <1s and your adversary has 10k times the RAM and can take a month they can make 26 billion guesses. So unless your password is fairly high entropy it is at risk. Especially if they have more resources or more time. PINs are definitely out of the question, and simple passwords too.
I had one of the SanDisk flash drives that had some launcher thing on it and I had a password for some reason on it.
In high school, a classmate tried to guess it, 3 times and I lost everything on it forever, since it stupidly locked forever after 3 tries.
I had software projects from back then that I can never get back… including a web browser. I could have had the next Firefox…
If you’re out there, Liz: I’ll never forgive that.
Hardware signing devices have lots of utility because they keep the key from ever being on the machine (which is more likely to be compomised). Think ledger or trezor for your Bitcoin. Hardware encryption devices are just really expensive and black-box ways to avoid Veracrypt.
If your encryption algorithm is secure, you have no use for automatic lock-out. If it’s not, automatic lockout won’t do much against an attacker with physical access to the device. Unless they are dumb enough to trigger the lockout AND the internal memory wipes itself sufficiently well AND/OR the attacker doesn’t have the resources to reverse engineer the device.
If your encryption algorithm is secure, you have no use for automatic lock-out.
This isn’t true. You need your algorithm and your key to be secure. If the key needs to be remembered or entered often it probably can’t be secure. So brute force protection becomes very important.
If it’s not, automatic lockout won’t do much against an attacker with physical access to the device.
This isn’t true. Yes, with enough time and effort it is possible to extract any data from any device. But in practice physical HSMs do an excellent job at raising the cost of key extraction. I would much rather have an attacker steal my Yubikey than a USB with my GPG key lying on it.
