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> It's crazy that Lenovo will still be trusted to build secured hardware after that.

Lenovo already has an history of backdooring the devices they sell, sometimes in exchange for money. It's insane that anyone trusts them for anything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levono#Security_and_privacy_in...

He used codex on other devices. He just opened the Lenovo USB case no AI needed because the sd card can be read by using a reader. The USB connection is disabled/enabled by the fingerprint reader.

So many boxes to tick, and with a company culture that leans towards box ticking and apathy (regulatory checklists without the extra checkbox “is that last checkbox a real checkbox" then you have to talk to the nerd department who's too busy for your stupid questions... Etc. Etc.) What can we expect? I'm disappointed in Lenovo for this, but my own apathy expects no one will be held accountable!

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Linked linked article: https://hackingpassion.com/lenovo-thinkplus-encrypted-usb-sd...

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.

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.

We used these: https://apricorn.com/aegis-padlock-usb3

They work well in high security environments because you can allowlist the vendor and product id of only these hard drives, and you don't have to set up procedures where people HAVE to encrypt their drives before use.

So cost-wise it makes sense.

But for personal use? BitLocker / VeraCrypt all the way.

>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.

A good reason you have to use these sticks is stand-alone devices.

For example, you need to print something; take some data from an oscilloscope or other instrument.

Your alternatives are to connect those devices to your network or some devices run Windows you can alt-tab out of and install your own software. Given risks and complexity of those, a hardware encrypted USB stick is the least bad.

You don't necessarily want free software and traditional cryptography for such use cases.

The traditional free software approach to cryptography is "derive the key from a passphrase; require the user to make the passphrase strong; if the passphrase is weak, put the onus on the user."

This works well for HNers, but is terrible for normies. What normal users want is a locked down chip (potentially running open source firmware!), which securely stores something like an AES key protected by a 6-digit pin, which gets erased after 10 unsuccessful attempts and cannot be cloned. This is how TPMs, Apple's secure enclaves and bank and SIM cards work. This kind of design did more to bring full-disk encryption to end users than any free software ever did.

These kinds of product are great for disaster recovery. E.g. your day to day use is software encrypted with a key bound to a TPM and stored in a central crypto store that verifies devices state before giving it out etc etc but then what do you do when all that shit breaks? Having the root key material on a hardware encrypted device on a safe is a great way to be able to restore from failures.

We have to use the ones that cost 8x more than regular ones and are certified by something that our industry approves.

There's a guy with some Bitcoin that knows about a model, I'd trust that one.

The ironkey at least has reasonable independent evaluations.

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.

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Hollwood hacker bruteforce the AES256 key in 10 minutes, one character after another

It goes even deeper. On Toms Hardware you find a link to a blog that is based on a talk.

Especially since apparently Reddit now requires me to download their shitty app just to be able to see the full text now. That’s semi-new. Gross.

https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/alerts/2015/02/20/lenovo-su...

I also added Sony to the list after their rootkit fiasco.

And Dell as well after their own Superfish-like malware.

Recently I added LG to the list.

None, they will just claim that opening the device voids the security features.

If you're a big enough company, you can sell a rock inside a hard-drive-shaped case and claim in advertising it's a hard drive, and not suffer any consequences, at least in the USA where we treat corporations with kid gloves.

https://www.thinkpad.com/device/458

Thought was fake branded product at first and just no one bothered to check, but apparently is available in Lenovo CN's store.

Yeah, searching I only got Chinese pages and copies of this article itself. Tried searching directly too. I have a hard time they pulled it of shelves so fast that the internet already erased it... I'd expect at least "out of stock" pages to remain.

And the article doesn't even have an image of the product as sold.

https://aliexpress.ru/item/1_963163498.html

In some ways Lenovo's implementation would have been better to just openly advertise that this is how it works - easier to not do encryption at all than to claim you did but make some mistake along the way. Fingerprint would thus keep honest people honest and if you needed something more resistant you knew you would need to do it yourself.

>I always said that in-device encryption that you cannot verify is useless and considered those SATA drives with built-in encryption to be useless. Famous HN luminaries disagreed with me.

I mean, yeah? Throwing around words like "useless" without context is almost universally unserious and irritating in a security conversation since security is about economics and threat scenarios. I'm aware of the 2019 paper "Self-Encrypting Deception: Weaknesses in the Encryption of Solid State Drives" [0], but not a lot since then on the state of Opal and any other SED mechanisms and real world effects. Even for the drives discussed there, it's not clear it actually affects what much of the population cared about in terms of FDE, which would more be along the lines of "it'd be hard for a random casual person to pop the drive into an enclosure and just mount it and copy everything off, I don't have to use a super long password all the time, and it doesn't cost noticeable speed".

As another practical issue, encryption is not something most people can verify anyway whether they have the code or not. The pure cold data at rest symmetric use-case means that a lot of hot attacks and side channel stuff isn't so important, even so I sure wouldn't trust myself to either write it or verify it. I mean, I guess I could spot some truly dumb-tier backdoor hard coded keys but not anything subtle in terms of weakness, and even then not every single software update. For most people/organizations they're all black boxes based on trust in the manufacturer/developer(s).

I mean, I don't disagree with you that personally I go with software, less from an encryption pov (though it's not nothing) and more from a recovery-if-things-go-fubar pov. I'd agree the incentives are better, and that while many-eyes is not a panacea lower barriers for security researchers to poke around is still better on balance. Perhaps the LLM-era further pushes it that way, and really will make it more practical for more people to check over software solutions.

But still seems like kind of a stretch for you to assert that Apple's (or many others) in-device encryption is "useless"? We've seen some pretty powerful organizations worldwide really want to get at protected data and then fail even when stakes were high.

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0: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8835339

Then why did it say it was encrypted when it’s not?

> hyperbolic marketing

More like fraudulent marketing.

I’m sure it’s just rank incompetence. Someone thought they were making a secure product and they didn’t know how to do that, or how to verify it. They told marketing that they built a super secure system and marketing trusted them and ran with it.

My uncle considers himself a “tech guy” and had an app published years ago that secures your medical information with “military grade” encryption and it was just a ridiculous shit show of incompetence. But he truly believed he was doing something. Sprinkle some AES on it and it’s secure, right?

It was potted (page 19 of the slides https://github.com/xusheng6/breaking_encrypted_USB_drives_wi... )

> an interim fix using epoxy over the card

It was

Potted shouldn't matter; if the data is encrypted it doesn't matter if the bits are readable by anyone

Too expensive at scale

>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]

[1] https://static0.howtogeekimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/upl...

Because incompetence.

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As things are, they probably don't even know there is a website called hacker news.

A fingerprint sensor?

Oh god dammit, I have to stop using semicolons now? That's stupid.

They were if you read a news source that catered to literate readers.

Not long ago it would have been an em dash.

I mean, it's a terrible subheading because it's way too long, but it's grammatically correct. It doesn't read like AI to me, why do you think it is?