Lenovo's 'encrypted' fingerprint USB is just an unencrypted SD card in a case

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Recently I added LG to the list.

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

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

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

More like fraudulent marketing.

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

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...