Privacy

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What are your thoughts on USB storage drives that have keypad encryption? (leminal.space)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

124 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

(page 3) 27 comments

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Something else to break down.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

One thing I can tell you, it's that you can't use them as bootable drives to install an OS from. And if you try to pass the USB connection from an ESXi host to a VM on it, it won't work.

Aside from that, they're really annoying to work with.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Didn't use ironkey specifically but you can totally boot from an apricorn. Basically involved plugging it in, rebooting the machine, and VERY rapidly entering the unlock code before the bios finishes starting up and gets to the "so which drives are bootable?" phase.

It was hellish but it was also corporate policy to not use any USB storage devices that did not have a keypad for encryption. And DVDs were strongly controlled by the IT department (who were about as stupid as you would expect to have signed off on a policy like that).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Ah it was easy enough to get the iron key unlocked during post, as those HP servers take forever to boot, problem was the bios couldn't recognize the USB. Whatever firmware is on it that does the security confused the system, and while it saw the drive, it didn't know what it was and wouldn't boot from it. In both uefi mode, and in legacy bios mode

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

If you are lucky enough to know the admin key for the apricorn drives you can put them in lock override mode which keeps it unlocked till it completely loses power off the USB bus

[–] [email protected] -1 points 9 months ago (2 children)

It's very hard to actually secure something someone has physical access to and that can be disassembled.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Yeah. It does add another layer of security but if someone has the resources and motivation to get into an encrypted file or folder I suppose they could probably find a way around the hardware aspect. A bit of a niche use case.

I'm not sure how difficult it would be to get around the hardware aspect though especially with the higher end versions of these drives.

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