15 ms·

What is the benefit of having FIPS hardware-level encryption on a USB stick?

265 points by personjerry 6y ago

jphoward 6y ago
I think links like this are really helpful. Too offer I suffer from the (common on HN) mindset of, "I know nothing about this field, but I'm intelligent enough to know this is stupid". Posts like this are not only interesting, but give me a small dose of humility.
- garmaine 6y ago
  I don't know, this is my field and the post is pretty stupid. Hardware encryption is trivial to do, even in a small form-factor, low-power device like USB storage. A 60x price differential is completely unreasonable. This is rent-seeking on market segmentation. Certain government agencies and contractors are prohibited by law from using a bog standard USB storage device, and require this FIPS certified thing instead. The manufacturers know this. They also have budget to pay, when they are forced to.
  - swebs 6y ago
    Did you read the top answer? Level 3 compliance doesn't sound trivial at all.
    - fabian2k 6y ago
      The price seems reasonable for the kind of effort that compliance requires. Though if you are not bound by this very particular security level, it probably doesn't make sense to use this instead of strong cryptography alone. If the encryption is strong enough, you don't need the fancy intrusion detection.
      - andai 6y ago
        Say, if encryption isn't done on the device itself, then it wouldn't need to be tamper proof would it?
        solarkraft 6y ago
        Yeah. To my untrained eye it looks like FIPS-140 was designed for devices handling unencrypted data (anything with computation) where physical security matters and this USB stick is just a by-product of a blanket requirement that it's used.
        toyg 6y ago
        Isn't that a good thing? Anything implemented in software puts some burden on the user's side ("are you using the right OS with the right program and the right options in the right way? Just one misstep and it's all for naught"). Offloading more of that cognitive load and operational risk onto dedicated hardware is surely a good thing (if uneconomical) in practice.
        Nullabillity 6y ago
        The USB host still has access to both the plaintext and key (once authenticated), so they both need to be fully trusted anyway. This garbage just adds yet another link to the critical chain. Oh, and now you have full plain text access over the (unencrypted and unauthenticated) USB bus. Hope you put as much effort into vetting your USB hubs!
        toyg 6y ago
        When I was writing that post, I had actually added a second paragraph, that basically said "I hope there were some standard mechanisms for the hardware to refuse mounting without a password or some other verification system". I eventually deleted it because there might well be something of the sort already, in the bowels of TPM specs and similar. There is no reason, imho, why we shouldn't strive to "encrypt all the things", including buses, so that data is guaranteed to be available only to fully-trusted chains. This should obviously be configurable by administrators, with destruction guarantees when options are relaxed. This will not be for everyone (and yes, it will likely always be weak against the $5-wrench attack), but for people who really need it (like deployed troops, whose default opsec practices are typically too lax to be left to humans).
    - garmaine 6y ago
      The top answer writes enthusiastically about how difficult it is, but without providing any real details. The crazy epoxy stuff he writes about is not specified in the FIPS requirements but rather a lazy hack some people do when they want to run non-FIPS certified consumer hardware. Remarkably he even hypothesizes the solution that they almost certainly are using here, without realizing how trivial it is: > Guess: maybe there are tiny wires in the casing and an "intrusion detection" chip with its own battery that is never powered off so that it can monitor for breakage of the wires and trigger a wipe? This is very likely what they are doing. And it's both simple and cheap to manufacture and implement at scale. Basically the inner-side of the metal casing is conductive and etched to be a big wire looping around the device, forming a circuit. Any attempt to drill or decase it will break the circuit and trigger a wipe. The wipe itself is done by a small 16-bit microcontroller powered off a watch battery or large capacitor. All the parts cost less than a dollar, and the case etching machine is something a company like Kingston would have on hand for other purposes. At my last job we had to roll our own physical security solution for protecting keys because the off-the-shelf FIPS level 3 stuff was so brain-dead stupid and easy to defeat that it didn't meat our security needs.
      - manigandham 6y ago
        How would you defeat that if it's supposed to be so easy?
        garmaine 6y ago
        Many options. Drill through the conductive portion of the USB connector itself, which obviously can't be part of the circuit. Put it in a cryogenic freezer to kill the electronics without wiping the static ram. Evesdrop on the USB connection itself which leaks EM radiation like a sieve. User power analysis to extract the key since a device in this form factor is typically not using constant-power components. That's just off the top of my head.
        buran77 6y ago
        I see you're now confusing "raising the bar for a successful hack" with "must be guaranteed impenetrable". One can invest a lot into obtaining a successful hack so we might as well not even try to protect it? Let that sink in before your next comment. Standing against your own point is that your HN account password is not posted in your profile even if it could be obtained with the famous $5 wrench. But to your point, at Level 3 it most likely means any normal attempt to open the case or rewrite the firmware would irretrievably destroy the device or wipe the encryption keys. Flash freezing a device or drilling is likely to have this effect since some of the epoxy housing should be made to crack and sever specific connection triggering the wipe before all of the heat is conducted away from the inner components. Same for using solvents, acids, or radiation which may be more of a Level 4 compliance. As for the power constant components (whether they are at L3 or L4), they may or may not be used. It may very well be part of the asking price. Apple's T2 chip is FIPS 140-2 compliant and you can be certain a lot of money was invested in making it secure yet it was still jailbroken.
    - spacecad3t 6y ago
      Im a product manager who took a device through level 3 and yes, it is not trivial. Now, that same device is also NSA Type-1 ... which is not an official cert and damn near impossible. Took me and my sales lead 8 months just to find a military officer willing to sponsor.
      - fbnlsr 6y ago
        I'd love to read about that device of yours and how you managed to get such a certification.
        spacecadet 6y ago
        It started with possible Customers saying they couldn't close out larger orders and grant "in field" operation without FIPS and Type 1. We already met FIPS 2, it took some reworking for FIPS 3, and Type 1 actually isn't too bad, it's the networking your way into the NSA (and a sponsor) and them giving you the time of day. Many of our Customer contacts LOVED the product, but were not appropriate sponsors and their intros just always went cold. The best part of the story is when we finally got a phone number to someones desk at the NSA and I just cold called it. "Hello...", "Hi [my intro]", "[silence]"... lol
      - jmnicolas 6y ago
        So in your experience is the price for this USB drive justified?
        spacecadet 6y ago
        Depends on the needs of the Customer... Our Customers required FIPS and Type 1 and our pricing research suggested we could also tack on a premium for the product.
  - Daviey 6y ago
    The cost based on sum-of-parts, does seem to be unreasonable... but few products are measured based on their ingredients alone. Having been involved in the FIPS-140 certification process I know first hand it is both slow and expensive. It is fair to say that the general consumer version shouldn't shoulder the burden of this cost, and the market for this product is small. Therefore, the 'unreasonable' price likely isn't that ridiculous.
  - onetimemanytime 6y ago
    >>Certain government agencies and contractors are prohibited by law from using a bog standard USB storage device, and require this FIPS certified thing instead. The manufacturers know this. This is nothing new. So why hasn't another manufacturer done at much cheaper prices in those these years? As for encrypting: Hiding pictures from your wife is a lot different than hiding corporate or state secrets from Russia and China.
    - AniseAbyss 6y ago
      I'm sure they have but the US military only buys from the US so that cuts out most manufacturers.
- sarthakjshetty 6y ago
  Bot much? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25196874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25196874
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - OJFord 6y ago
    Actually I think maybe GP was sincere, and that one (your link) copied it. GP has months (at least) of comments, and they're not vacuous. (Unless they're all copied from elsewhere too, but there aren't replies identifying that, and I'm not going to dig into it. :))
    - 93po 6y ago
      It's not sincere. It's clearly worded that it could work for virtually any sort of content on HN
      - OJFord 6y ago
        Look at their other comments. I'm sure some of my own comments could also be misconstrued as 'fake comments' applying to virtually any submission!
      - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
        I don’t think so. Not everything linked here seems stupid at first glance, and the comment clearly says that this does.
  - tspiteri 6y ago
    You're replying to a comment with item id 25196754, and your link has item id 25196874, which comes later.
- joshxyz 6y ago
  Reminds me of the first time I saw that stackoverflow page comparing hash algorithms (from crc32 md5 xxhash to sha) thru patterns it generated onto an image. Also answers by the zlib guy, the nagle algorithm guy. Explanations like those just blow my mind.
  - programbreeding 6y ago
    >stackoverflow page comparing hash algorithms (from crc32 md5 xxhash to sha) thru patterns it generated onto an image. https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/145633 https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/145633 >Also answers by the zlib guy https://stackoverflow.com/a/20765054 https://stackoverflow.com/a/20765054 https://stackoverflow.com/users/1180620/mark-adler https://stackoverflow.com/users/1180620/mark-adler >the nagle algorithm guy https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Animats https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Animats
vmurthy 6y ago
Great answer by Mike Ounsworth [0] . I learnt about something called FIPS-2 today :) [0]https://security.stackexchange.com/users/61443/mike-ounsworth https://security.stackexchange.com/users/61443/mike-ounswort...
franga2000 6y ago
> For rack-mounted servers, I've seen things like the entire motherboard and hard drive submerged in 5 kg of heat-conductive epoxy resin so that it's nearly impossible to remove the RAM sticks or hard drive without destroying them. I find it absolutely hilarious that there are some organisations going to such lengths to protect their data but other organisations with just as sensitive data keep it in unpatched datastores and leaky S3 buckets...
- howlgarnish 6y ago
  Having worked with some financial institutions, I can assure you it's often the same orgs that spend bazillions on extra-super-secure hardware etc and then leave security holes large enough to drive trucks through elsewhere. In short, if you make the process to do things the Right Way hard enough, people will just circumvent the process.
  - qz2 6y ago
    It's even worse than that from experience. Most of these financial institutions had terrible practices before and the surface area of their terrible practices is huge and mostly unknown. So when they go and apply some new super secure process or audit they don't actually apply it across their entire estate or the organisation is so thoroughly compartmentalised that it's impossible to get everyone to align with the goals of the audit. The only outcome is what they call a partial success but I call a complete failure.
  - jtwaleson 6y ago
    That wording is brilliant. I struggle with this a lot in a regulated industry. Everyone wants to do The Right Thing, but doing it "The Right Way" and documenting accordingly is so much work!
    - 542354234235 6y ago
      Also, the people in charge just putting all the onus on individual operators. That they will jump through all those hoops because it is “the right way” so of course they will do it. Well, news flash. A lot of people don’t and if you have a security breach, its cold comfort that it was because someone took a shortcut on step 438 of your pointlessly difficult process. Imagine if airline safety operated that way. “Well, it is up to the pilot to make sure they pay attention and keep up with their training. They will do it because it is the right way.” No, they look at how can they make it impossible to do the wrong thing. How can they make this alarm impossible to ignore? In this very specific scenario, is it possible for this problem to go unnoticed or undetected? How can we train pilots and ensure they understand in a real world situation? Etc. Which is the right model, in my opinion. It isn’t “on paper, does this technically solve the problem” it is “regardless of user error or equipment failure, will this still solve the problem”.
al3xandre 6y ago
Because the procurement bureaucrat in charge of buying « secure usb storage » in some random corporate company can then tick a box on a checklist to cover his ass.
elliotpage 6y ago
There is a great detailed answer on the page but for me it boils down to "so I never have to think about it ever again". I'm sure veracrypt on the cheap drive works very well, but I dont want to think about usb drives ever again so if I can make the problem go away (and its the customer/company paying for it) i'll buy the product with off the shelf capabilities.
- Daviey 6y ago
  The never having to think about it, in this context is don't use them. A significant amount of government and businesses have blanket bans on USB pendrives and disable USB mass-storage in the mobile devices themselves. Making solutions that do not require carrying of sensitive material on portable devices is a much safer approach.
  - elliotpage 6y ago
    Agreed, my own day job enforces this (much to the chagrin of users who assume they can)
  - yread 6y ago
    Aren't USB sticks like these used in air-gapped systems? So, a bit more security-sensitive than "just" banning USB pendrives and gluing the USB ports.
pedroaraujo 6y ago
The upvoted answer didn't really answer the OP. I get that level 3 means that the device is able to detect physical tampering. But why would I need this if anyone can just plug the USB stick into any PC?
- jmnicolas 6y ago
  It's hardware encrypted so the only 2 solutions to get the data are to either brute force it (impossible) or to get the crypto key from the chip inside. If I understand correctly this drive is supposed to detect tampering and erase the key if you attempt to open the encasing.
Bayart 6y ago
The answer to « Why does X with Y certification costs Z ? » generally comes down to insurance.
lordnacho 6y ago
I'm not sure what the answerer is trying to imply, but it seems like it's more a question of willingness to pay being very different between government and private individuals than real differences in quality. Sure, there has to be some sort of hoop to jump through with certification, but it doesn't sound like it actually makes a laptop's worth of price difference. Businesses do this all the time, they make an item and sell it at different prices to different entities. Put a small wrinkle on the expensive version so it's not too embarassing for the guy who buys the expensive one. That way you get what the cheap guy is willing to pay and the rich guy. Even universities do this with tuition fees. I have friends who write code for the government, and they also raise their prices for the same thing, they've even been told they were too cheap to seem credible.
- noneeeed 6y ago
  Something to consider in these kinds of cases is that you're not just paying for a more complex physical product, but the the cost of actually designing and certifying the device. The market for the basic stick is massive, so the cost of design and product development is spread across many, many units. The market for the FIPS stick will be tiny in comparison. That means that the cost of design and development will be both higher (more complex product) and spread across many fewer units. Now add on the cost of going through the certification, which will involve massive amoounts of paperwork, box-ticking and bureaucracy and the cost of development really shoots up compared with slapping some memory cells and an interface into a plastic box. I used to work on safety critical software, and the amount of time that was actually spent writing code was really quite small compared to the effort required to demonstrate both to ourselve, but also to the certifying authorities that the software was safe. The Verifcation and Validation teams would often be far larger than the original development teams. Having said that, I am absolutely sure there will also be some price gouging going on because there will be only a small number of companies that make FIPS certified devices and so competition is lower.
  - coddle-hark 6y ago
    The company I work for runs networks on trains. We pay at least 10x for all our components (switches, APs, cables etc.) for exactly this reason; everything needs to be certified a bunch of times. And since there’s so few people buying these devices they’re often buggy and work much worse than commercial off the shelf hardware. Interestingly, you can slap just about anything you want in a bus without a second thought.
marcan_42 6y ago
I'm going to offer a different opinion: The difference is that if you encrypt a file with a strong, industry standard algorithm, with proper key derivation, enough entropy on your passphrase, and stick it on a $27 USB key, you can be personally certain (by most reasonable standards) that your data is secure at rest. However, if you put a file on a $1657 IronKey, you have to trust the certification (the Infineon ROCA snafu has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that FIPS certification is no guarantee when it comes to the crypto algorithms - and look at stuff like that CVE that affected only the FIPS version of the YubiKey due to extra complexity the certification stuff required!), and have no guarantee that your data is indeed encrypted with your passphrase. Indeed, it's quite common for these "secure" devices to merely encrypt your data with a fixed or variable but not passphrase-derived encryption key, and then merely check the passphrase against a hash (with attempt limits). They are hardened against attacks to bypass this, but they do not offer pure cryptographic protection for your data, unlike the $27 + software solution. Put another way: use a long enough passphrase, and the $27 solution is superior. Use a short passphrase or PIN, and the $1657 solution is hopefully superior (though you have no true guarantee or way to know for sure). You are paying >$1k for the convenience of using a short passphrase, and in exchange you have to trust the manufacturer. Give me a megabuck or two and I bet I have a good chance of getting your files out of an IronKey. Give me a megabuck or two and I can do nothing against software encryption with a 32-character passphrase. If I'm lucky I might even find an IronKey exploit that can be performed for much cheaper. Finding physical exploits (e.g. power, EMI, or even optical glitching attacks, nevermind stuff like pure firmware exploits) is much easier than breaking proper crypto. By the way, the same trade-off exists with Android (in old school FDE mode) vs iPhone secure enclave stuff. The iPhone solution has many advantages for many use cases, but if we're talking strictly about security of data at rest (i.e. from a powered off state) I trust my rooted Android with a long FDE passphrase over any iPhone. The latter only entangles a subset of user data with the lockscreen code, and does not allow you to set a separate longer boot-time passphrase from the normal unlock code (nor does regular Android, but you can do it with root). (disclaimer: it's been years since I looked at IronKeys and had this thought experiment; at the time they definitely made no claims of deriving the encryption key from your passphrase and I seem to recall reading somewhere that they don't, but I haven't checked their marketing these days)
- 6y ago
1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
Perhaps the buyer is not paying, she is only the purchaser. The purchase is actually paid for by taxpayers.
Hackbraten 6y ago
To put it into perspective, Kingston offers other sizes down to 4 GB, which cost about one tenth. Depending of your use case and what kind of data you want to store, I think it’s reasonably cheap for the added convenience. I own a 1 GB IronKey myself (purchased back in 2008 when I worked as an IT contractor for a German telecommunications company). Mine sadly no longer works under current macOS versions but other than that, I remember being quite happy with it.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
haunter 6y ago
> I'm impressed that they got a USB stick past Level 3 testing. Guess: maybe there are tiny wires in the casing and an "intrusion detection" chip with its own battery that is never powered off so that it can monitor for breakage of the wires and trigger a wipe? Now I want to see a teardown of this USB stick
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Little did you know, it achieved that level by wiping the mind of the person tampering with it rather than wiping itself.
  - switch11 6y ago
    This is likelier than the alternatives
  - aasasd 6y ago
    Now I'm vaguely curious as to whether FIPS postulates that the devices must not have explosives and nerve gas as the tamper protection.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  I can imagine this... two extremely thin foils separated by an insulating layer, one connected to a supercap charged at 100V at every time the stick is plugged in, the other layer connected to all pins of the flash memory via diodes. Then, encase the whole thing in epoxy. When someone attempts to cut it open now, the short between the foils will discharge the supercap to fry the memory.
  - dathinab 6y ago
    Sounds plausible especially given that most likely frying the view bytes containing the AES key is enough. (Most systems have a stored AES key which then again is encrypted e.g. with a password).
  - Someone 6y ago
    You can also wrap it in something that reacts vehemently with oxygen and wrap that in a thin foil. That may last longer than that capacitor and, I guess, is less easily defeated (does that charge fry the stored bits or only the logic for reading and writing it? How do you defend against Evie carefully drilling into the epoxy until contact with the charge is made?) A step up is two chemicals that don’t need oxygen (prevents Evie from opening the device in a nitrogen atmosphere). Bonus points if they only explode when depressurized, as then, you can mix them inside the device. I think techniques like those have been used in safes, but can’t find a link. I did find https://people.kth.se/~msmith/is2500_pdf/Anti-Tamper%20Techniques_elena.pdf https://people.kth.se/~msmith/is2500_pdf/Anti-Tamper%20Techn..., which discusses this use case. It mentions detecting attempts to X-ray the device, and even mentions using explosives (with a remark “this option is not practical for consumer electronics”). I guess that is not a problem in military hardware (if a F-35 falls into enemy hands, destroying its software probably is more important than destroying the plane)
amelius 6y ago
I think this is just a misunderstanding: the ad got targeted at the wrong person.
tinco 6y ago
Many people assume that if they're seeing something that's more expensive than they're used to that they're being ripped off for some reason. Ripping people off with high prices is actually very rare nowadays, mostly thanks to the big online marketplaces. These large price differentials are purely due to the insane economies of scale we're able to create. It's not a wonder that there's a 128GB USB stick as expensive as $1675, it's a wonder there's a 128GB USB stick as cheap as $27. Imagine it took 1 million dollars to develop the tech and implement the manufacturing process of a 128GB stick. Assume they cost $5 to manufacture, and $20 to market and ship. Then when you sell a million you've recuperated your R&D and made a million profit that warrants the 6 million upfront investment you had to do. Same story but now with the expensive 128GB sticks, of which you're only going to sell 1000. Even though the stick is 1675, you only make 1.650.000, so your effective budget to develop the fancy encryption scheme and make a profit is 650.000.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  I take it you haven’t seen “diamond plated HMDI cables” on Amazon that retail for hundreds of dollars?
- TonyTrapp 6y ago
  I keep telling this to friends who complained that hard disk manufacturers are plotting against them by not lowering hard disk prices long after floods have damaged hard disk factories. You have to consider how absolutely incredibly cheap this stuff actually is. Take a high-quality wooden shelf. It's just a couple of wood boards, right? Yet it may cost ten times more than a USB stick or even an embedded development board. It's crazy.
  - beagle3 6y ago
    And the Doctors. You have to consider that $500 for a 15 minute visit at the doctor is ridiculously cheap, given the reduction in pain / the increase in productivity you usually gain from following their advice! /s Yes, some stuff seems to be unreasonably cheap or expensive in some context. But it's the market that prices it, and collusion is always bad for everyone (except the conspirators).
Grustaf 6y ago
The cheap one can’t be used as a harddrive since the write speed is 30 times slower. For reading the difference is 4x. So they are pretty different products.
martin_a 6y ago
From the answers: > FIPS 140-2 Level 3 is more than just encryption. It requires the device to be tested by a cryptography testing lab that is certified to perform this testing on behalf of the US government. So, this will likely contain backdoors for the US government, so I should NOT buy this item after all if I want my data to be really secure and instead go for software encryption...
- cduzz 6y ago
  Is there something stopping you from using the fips 140-2 box and also using strong software encryption on top of that? I imagine doing so would have the advantage that trivial examination of the device would be impossible.
  - martin_a 6y ago
    Well, the OP on Stack Overflow was asking what the benefit of using a FIPS-secured device is. The hardware encryption itself is probably not enough if you want to keep your stuff secure from the US government. So you can fall back to software encryption right from the start. No need to spend lots of money on the hardware piece, except you need a "tinkering proof" device.
_trampeltier 6y ago
When I see topics like this one, I allways wonder, why there is not an univeral standard for USB-Stick encryption. I would not matter what OS, just ask for the passphrase when you insert the stick.
mouzogu 6y ago
The amount of caveats in his question made me laugh. This guy certainly knows his audience.
a5withtrrs 6y ago
As of a few years ago (2009 ish) the important chips in an IronKey were AT98SC032CT-USB and OnSpec xSil 269. I've got an old one kicking around somewhere. I'll tear it down and post pictures in the near future.
motohagiography 6y ago
Can tell you from experience in healthcare, the difference between a regular usb stick and one that has a verifiable security level is that if you lose track of a stick with a research data set on it, it's the difference between doing local incident response, and individually notifying 1m+ people their health information has been breached. If it's on a USB stick, you've already lost control, but there was a case at a hospital where they avoided that cost because the lost device was encrypted.
tke248 6y ago
The difference with Ironkeys are you can remotely deactivate/erase them.
vngzs 6y ago
FIPS 140-2 level 3 128GB flash drives are available for $223.39[0]. I don't know why you'd pay $1,665. [0]: https://www.cdw.com/product/kingston-datatraveler-4000-g2-management-ready-usb-flash-drive-128-gb/6155875 https://www.cdw.com/product/kingston-datatraveler-4000-g2-ma...
AntiImperialist 6y ago
The most important part of the pricing is the intended consumer. It is expected to be used by government officials and employees of big companies, for whom, the price is not a big factor. Then comes the competition. Not a lot of companies are making these. The next one is volume. They're not going to sell as many of these so they produce them at a much lower scale, driving the cost per unit up. Then comes everything else.
thrower123 6y ago
I didn't know people still required FIPS. Microsoft has been recommending disabling it for years in Windows - about a decade ago I would sometimes run into issues where the standard DotNet AES encryption wouldn't work on FIPS boxes, but I haven't seen that particular issue in a long time.
qwerty456127 6y ago
Even without FIPS, encrypted USB drives are about an order of magnitude more expensive than non-encrypred ones. I actually want an encrypted one to set me free from having to use VeraCrypt so I could enjoy the convenience of the plug-and-play experience while being sure a random person to find my drive if I loose it won't get the data. Perhaps I could just use BitLocker but it's not available in Windows 10 Home (like if home PCs didn't contain any sensitive data).
mcguire 6y ago
This thread seems to involve many people who have taken ECON 101 and think it corresponds with reality. For example: "If you got to a gas station near me, you can get a CR2032 battery for say 2 USD. If you got to a certain home decor/equipment store a mile away, you'll get 4 of these batteries for 1 USD. That's what, 8x more expensive for a relatively common product?" This isn't a difference between .25¢ for 1 and $2 for one. It is the difference between $4 and a bit of a search for 1 plus three more to stuff in a drawer and $2 for one here now where you are. And $2 is the cost of, what, a couple ounces of coffee? This is what ECON 101 calls irrationality.
annoyingnoob 6y ago
The benefit is that you are compliant when the Government contract you are working on requires FIPS encrypted devices. You cannot be compliant with your Government contract unless you use the kind of encryption the contract specifies. You are paying for the certificate, not for the software. Its not easy to become FIPS certified, there are costs.
dpc_pw 6y ago
From my PoV, FIPS is bureaucratic nonsense and people trusting in it deserve what they are getting. It might have had sense a long time ago, to ensure that vendors don't do something ridiculous and call it a day. It does mandate certain thing that are common sense and good practice, yes. But you can't really mandate security via a checklists from 10 years ago. Government can't keep up with cryptography, software bugs being discovered, new threats and so on. It's just too slow, and requires more than just going through a checklist. The exact details of how things are done at the lower level are simply insane. It's very common that the FIPS-certified product has security strictly lower than non certified one, e.g. because the certified FIPS base had bugs, that are known, trivial to get fixed (3-liners, etc) but can't because that would take months/years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to re-certify the whole codebase being patched. The whole thing was probably created by lobbyists to create another corrupted channel to monopolize and overcharge government and related institutions, just like many other nonsensical laws in the US.
dang 6y ago
The submitted title ("Why pay $1657 for a $27 USB stick?") broke the site guidelines by editorializing. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, which includes: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
fdye 6y ago
So I can give a real life example of the type of customer that uses these exclusively. My previous employment was leading development on a media scanning station, a bit like an ATM, but with a lot of ports in front to accept USBs, CDROM, etc. We provided this product to the energy, defense, pharmaceutical, etc sectors. Essentially critical infrastructure. Many of our customers utilize air-gaps to isolate their critical systems. So to get files into those systems you basically have to sneaker net it, usually using portable media of some kind. The basic procedure using our product was to take an "unknown" piece of media with the files you wanna move over. Slot it into our station, then grab a "known" piece of media and put it into the other port on the station. The station would scan all of the files using several commercial AVs, then files deemed to be clean would be copied to the "known" piece of media. The important thing about the "known" piece of media is that its generally one of these expensive USBs with FIPS encryption, and crucially the FIPS epoxy and digitally signed firmware on the controller. Often these facilities are like onions with several layers of security, and this procedure must be done several times to get to the truly sensitive equipment, along with guards checking receipts and unlocking media from lockboxes, etc. Having everyone at the facility using the same drive, especially if you can purchase in known serial numbers, is good practice. That way anyone using a different model drive is easily spotted and programmatically you can lockdown to those known serials before mounting. Similarly if someone tries to take it apart the FIPS epoxy should destroy the internals of the microcontroller. They drill through the epoxy and flash the firmware, the microcontroller in these drives will reject cause it is not signed. Finally, if they do manage to build an exact replica, with the correct serials but some nasty internals, it wont matter since they are forced to use a "known" drive before stepping up to the next security level (the bad drives gets left at the low security gap). Its not perfect, but it does build defense in depth, especially with more mundane things added into the mix like FBI background checks, etc. You quickly get into mission impossible scenarios requiring physical agents gaining access to reach the inner layers of these critical systems.
asdz 6y ago
This remind me of a question during my last interview: "Why should we hire you when you are X times more expensive than a fresh graduate?"

265 points by personjerry 6y ago

I think links like this are really helpful. Too offer I suffer from the (common on HN) mindset of, "I know nothing about this field, but I'm intelligent enough to know this is stupid". Posts like this are not only interesting, but give me a small dose of humility.

garmaine 6y ago
I don't know, this is my field and the post is pretty stupid. Hardware encryption is trivial to do, even in a small form-factor, low-power device like USB storage. A 60x price differential is completely unreasonable. This is rent-seeking on market segmentation. Certain government agencies and contractors are prohibited by law from using a bog standard USB storage device, and require this FIPS certified thing instead. The manufacturers know this. They also have budget to pay, when they are forced to.
- swebs 6y ago
  Did you read the top answer? Level 3 compliance doesn't sound trivial at all.
  - fabian2k 6y ago
    The price seems reasonable for the kind of effort that compliance requires. Though if you are not bound by this very particular security level, it probably doesn't make sense to use this instead of strong cryptography alone. If the encryption is strong enough, you don't need the fancy intrusion detection.
    - andai 6y ago
      Say, if encryption isn't done on the device itself, then it wouldn't need to be tamper proof would it?
      - solarkraft 6y ago
        Yeah. To my untrained eye it looks like FIPS-140 was designed for devices handling unencrypted data (anything with computation) where physical security matters and this USB stick is just a by-product of a blanket requirement that it's used.
        toyg 6y ago
        Isn't that a good thing? Anything implemented in software puts some burden on the user's side ("are you using the right OS with the right program and the right options in the right way? Just one misstep and it's all for naught"). Offloading more of that cognitive load and operational risk onto dedicated hardware is surely a good thing (if uneconomical) in practice.
        Nullabillity 6y ago
        The USB host still has access to both the plaintext and key (once authenticated), so they both need to be fully trusted anyway. This garbage just adds yet another link to the critical chain. Oh, and now you have full plain text access over the (unencrypted and unauthenticated) USB bus. Hope you put as much effort into vetting your USB hubs!
        toyg 6y ago
        When I was writing that post, I had actually added a second paragraph, that basically said "I hope there were some standard mechanisms for the hardware to refuse mounting without a password or some other verification system". I eventually deleted it because there might well be something of the sort already, in the bowels of TPM specs and similar. There is no reason, imho, why we shouldn't strive to "encrypt all the things", including buses, so that data is guaranteed to be available only to fully-trusted chains. This should obviously be configurable by administrators, with destruction guarantees when options are relaxed. This will not be for everyone (and yes, it will likely always be weak against the $5-wrench attack), but for people who really need it (like deployed troops, whose default opsec practices are typically too lax to be left to humans).
  - garmaine 6y ago
    The top answer writes enthusiastically about how difficult it is, but without providing any real details. The crazy epoxy stuff he writes about is not specified in the FIPS requirements but rather a lazy hack some people do when they want to run non-FIPS certified consumer hardware. Remarkably he even hypothesizes the solution that they almost certainly are using here, without realizing how trivial it is: > Guess: maybe there are tiny wires in the casing and an "intrusion detection" chip with its own battery that is never powered off so that it can monitor for breakage of the wires and trigger a wipe? This is very likely what they are doing. And it's both simple and cheap to manufacture and implement at scale. Basically the inner-side of the metal casing is conductive and etched to be a big wire looping around the device, forming a circuit. Any attempt to drill or decase it will break the circuit and trigger a wipe. The wipe itself is done by a small 16-bit microcontroller powered off a watch battery or large capacitor. All the parts cost less than a dollar, and the case etching machine is something a company like Kingston would have on hand for other purposes. At my last job we had to roll our own physical security solution for protecting keys because the off-the-shelf FIPS level 3 stuff was so brain-dead stupid and easy to defeat that it didn't meat our security needs.
    - manigandham 6y ago
      How would you defeat that if it's supposed to be so easy?
      - garmaine 6y ago
        Many options. Drill through the conductive portion of the USB connector itself, which obviously can't be part of the circuit. Put it in a cryogenic freezer to kill the electronics without wiping the static ram. Evesdrop on the USB connection itself which leaks EM radiation like a sieve. User power analysis to extract the key since a device in this form factor is typically not using constant-power components. That's just off the top of my head.
        buran77 6y ago
        I see you're now confusing "raising the bar for a successful hack" with "must be guaranteed impenetrable". One can invest a lot into obtaining a successful hack so we might as well not even try to protect it? Let that sink in before your next comment. Standing against your own point is that your HN account password is not posted in your profile even if it could be obtained with the famous $5 wrench. But to your point, at Level 3 it most likely means any normal attempt to open the case or rewrite the firmware would irretrievably destroy the device or wipe the encryption keys. Flash freezing a device or drilling is likely to have this effect since some of the epoxy housing should be made to crack and sever specific connection triggering the wipe before all of the heat is conducted away from the inner components. Same for using solvents, acids, or radiation which may be more of a Level 4 compliance. As for the power constant components (whether they are at L3 or L4), they may or may not be used. It may very well be part of the asking price. Apple's T2 chip is FIPS 140-2 compliant and you can be certain a lot of money was invested in making it secure yet it was still jailbroken.
  - spacecad3t 6y ago
    Im a product manager who took a device through level 3 and yes, it is not trivial. Now, that same device is also NSA Type-1 ... which is not an official cert and damn near impossible. Took me and my sales lead 8 months just to find a military officer willing to sponsor.
    - fbnlsr 6y ago
      I'd love to read about that device of yours and how you managed to get such a certification.
      - spacecadet 6y ago
        It started with possible Customers saying they couldn't close out larger orders and grant "in field" operation without FIPS and Type 1. We already met FIPS 2, it took some reworking for FIPS 3, and Type 1 actually isn't too bad, it's the networking your way into the NSA (and a sponsor) and them giving you the time of day. Many of our Customer contacts LOVED the product, but were not appropriate sponsors and their intros just always went cold. The best part of the story is when we finally got a phone number to someones desk at the NSA and I just cold called it. "Hello...", "Hi [my intro]", "[silence]"... lol
    - jmnicolas 6y ago
      So in your experience is the price for this USB drive justified?
      - spacecadet 6y ago
        Depends on the needs of the Customer... Our Customers required FIPS and Type 1 and our pricing research suggested we could also tack on a premium for the product.
- Daviey 6y ago
  The cost based on sum-of-parts, does seem to be unreasonable... but few products are measured based on their ingredients alone. Having been involved in the FIPS-140 certification process I know first hand it is both slow and expensive. It is fair to say that the general consumer version shouldn't shoulder the burden of this cost, and the market for this product is small. Therefore, the 'unreasonable' price likely isn't that ridiculous.
- onetimemanytime 6y ago
  >>Certain government agencies and contractors are prohibited by law from using a bog standard USB storage device, and require this FIPS certified thing instead. The manufacturers know this. This is nothing new. So why hasn't another manufacturer done at much cheaper prices in those these years? As for encrypting: Hiding pictures from your wife is a lot different than hiding corporate or state secrets from Russia and China.
  - AniseAbyss 6y ago
    I'm sure they have but the US military only buys from the US so that cuts out most manufacturers.
sarthakjshetty 6y ago
Bot much? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25196874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25196874
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- OJFord 6y ago
  Actually I think maybe GP was sincere, and that one (your link) copied it. GP has months (at least) of comments, and they're not vacuous. (Unless they're all copied from elsewhere too, but there aren't replies identifying that, and I'm not going to dig into it. :))
  - 93po 6y ago
    It's not sincere. It's clearly worded that it could work for virtually any sort of content on HN
    - OJFord 6y ago
      Look at their other comments. I'm sure some of my own comments could also be misconstrued as 'fake comments' applying to virtually any submission!
    - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
      I don’t think so. Not everything linked here seems stupid at first glance, and the comment clearly says that this does.
- tspiteri 6y ago
  You're replying to a comment with item id 25196754, and your link has item id 25196874, which comes later.
joshxyz 6y ago
Reminds me of the first time I saw that stackoverflow page comparing hash algorithms (from crc32 md5 xxhash to sha) thru patterns it generated onto an image. Also answers by the zlib guy, the nagle algorithm guy. Explanations like those just blow my mind.
- programbreeding 6y ago
  >stackoverflow page comparing hash algorithms (from crc32 md5 xxhash to sha) thru patterns it generated onto an image. https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/145633 https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/145633 >Also answers by the zlib guy https://stackoverflow.com/a/20765054 https://stackoverflow.com/a/20765054 https://stackoverflow.com/users/1180620/mark-adler https://stackoverflow.com/users/1180620/mark-adler >the nagle algorithm guy https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Animats https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Animats

vmurthy 6y ago

Great answer by Mike Ounsworth [0] . I learnt about something called FIPS-2 today :) [0]https://security.stackexchange.com/users/61443/mike-ounsworth https://security.stackexchange.com/users/61443/mike-ounswort...

franga2000 6y ago

> For rack-mounted servers, I've seen things like the entire motherboard and hard drive submerged in 5 kg of heat-conductive epoxy resin so that it's nearly impossible to remove the RAM sticks or hard drive without destroying them. I find it absolutely hilarious that there are some organisations going to such lengths to protect their data but other organisations with just as sensitive data keep it in unpatched datastores and leaky S3 buckets...

howlgarnish 6y ago
Having worked with some financial institutions, I can assure you it's often the same orgs that spend bazillions on extra-super-secure hardware etc and then leave security holes large enough to drive trucks through elsewhere. In short, if you make the process to do things the Right Way hard enough, people will just circumvent the process.
- qz2 6y ago
  It's even worse than that from experience. Most of these financial institutions had terrible practices before and the surface area of their terrible practices is huge and mostly unknown. So when they go and apply some new super secure process or audit they don't actually apply it across their entire estate or the organisation is so thoroughly compartmentalised that it's impossible to get everyone to align with the goals of the audit. The only outcome is what they call a partial success but I call a complete failure.
- jtwaleson 6y ago
  That wording is brilliant. I struggle with this a lot in a regulated industry. Everyone wants to do The Right Thing, but doing it "The Right Way" and documenting accordingly is so much work!
  - 542354234235 6y ago
    Also, the people in charge just putting all the onus on individual operators. That they will jump through all those hoops because it is “the right way” so of course they will do it. Well, news flash. A lot of people don’t and if you have a security breach, its cold comfort that it was because someone took a shortcut on step 438 of your pointlessly difficult process. Imagine if airline safety operated that way. “Well, it is up to the pilot to make sure they pay attention and keep up with their training. They will do it because it is the right way.” No, they look at how can they make it impossible to do the wrong thing. How can they make this alarm impossible to ignore? In this very specific scenario, is it possible for this problem to go unnoticed or undetected? How can we train pilots and ensure they understand in a real world situation? Etc. Which is the right model, in my opinion. It isn’t “on paper, does this technically solve the problem” it is “regardless of user error or equipment failure, will this still solve the problem”.

al3xandre 6y ago

Because the procurement bureaucrat in charge of buying « secure usb storage » in some random corporate company can then tick a box on a checklist to cover his ass.

elliotpage 6y ago

There is a great detailed answer on the page but for me it boils down to "so I never have to think about it ever again". I'm sure veracrypt on the cheap drive works very well, but I dont want to think about usb drives ever again so if I can make the problem go away (and its the customer/company paying for it) i'll buy the product with off the shelf capabilities.

Daviey 6y ago
The never having to think about it, in this context is don't use them. A significant amount of government and businesses have blanket bans on USB pendrives and disable USB mass-storage in the mobile devices themselves. Making solutions that do not require carrying of sensitive material on portable devices is a much safer approach.
- elliotpage 6y ago
  Agreed, my own day job enforces this (much to the chagrin of users who assume they can)
- yread 6y ago
  Aren't USB sticks like these used in air-gapped systems? So, a bit more security-sensitive than "just" banning USB pendrives and gluing the USB ports.

pedroaraujo 6y ago

The upvoted answer didn't really answer the OP. I get that level 3 means that the device is able to detect physical tampering. But why would I need this if anyone can just plug the USB stick into any PC?

jmnicolas 6y ago
It's hardware encrypted so the only 2 solutions to get the data are to either brute force it (impossible) or to get the crypto key from the chip inside. If I understand correctly this drive is supposed to detect tampering and erase the key if you attempt to open the encasing.

Bayart 6y ago

The answer to « Why does X with Y certification costs Z ? » generally comes down to insurance.

lordnacho 6y ago

I'm not sure what the answerer is trying to imply, but it seems like it's more a question of willingness to pay being very different between government and private individuals than real differences in quality. Sure, there has to be some sort of hoop to jump through with certification, but it doesn't sound like it actually makes a laptop's worth of price difference. Businesses do this all the time, they make an item and sell it at different prices to different entities. Put a small wrinkle on the expensive version so it's not too embarassing for the guy who buys the expensive one. That way you get what the cheap guy is willing to pay and the rich guy. Even universities do this with tuition fees. I have friends who write code for the government, and they also raise their prices for the same thing, they've even been told they were too cheap to seem credible.

noneeeed 6y ago
Something to consider in these kinds of cases is that you're not just paying for a more complex physical product, but the the cost of actually designing and certifying the device. The market for the basic stick is massive, so the cost of design and product development is spread across many, many units. The market for the FIPS stick will be tiny in comparison. That means that the cost of design and development will be both higher (more complex product) and spread across many fewer units. Now add on the cost of going through the certification, which will involve massive amoounts of paperwork, box-ticking and bureaucracy and the cost of development really shoots up compared with slapping some memory cells and an interface into a plastic box. I used to work on safety critical software, and the amount of time that was actually spent writing code was really quite small compared to the effort required to demonstrate both to ourselve, but also to the certifying authorities that the software was safe. The Verifcation and Validation teams would often be far larger than the original development teams. Having said that, I am absolutely sure there will also be some price gouging going on because there will be only a small number of companies that make FIPS certified devices and so competition is lower.
- coddle-hark 6y ago
  The company I work for runs networks on trains. We pay at least 10x for all our components (switches, APs, cables etc.) for exactly this reason; everything needs to be certified a bunch of times. And since there’s so few people buying these devices they’re often buggy and work much worse than commercial off the shelf hardware. Interestingly, you can slap just about anything you want in a bus without a second thought.

marcan_42 6y ago

I'm going to offer a different opinion: The difference is that if you encrypt a file with a strong, industry standard algorithm, with proper key derivation, enough entropy on your passphrase, and stick it on a $27 USB key, you can be personally certain (by most reasonable standards) that your data is secure at rest. However, if you put a file on a $1657 IronKey, you have to trust the certification (the Infineon ROCA snafu has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that FIPS certification is no guarantee when it comes to the crypto algorithms - and look at stuff like that CVE that affected only the FIPS version of the YubiKey due to extra complexity the certification stuff required!), and have no guarantee that your data is indeed encrypted with your passphrase. Indeed, it's quite common for these "secure" devices to merely encrypt your data with a fixed or variable but not passphrase-derived encryption key, and then merely check the passphrase against a hash (with attempt limits). They are hardened against attacks to bypass this, but they do not offer pure cryptographic protection for your data, unlike the $27 + software solution. Put another way: use a long enough passphrase, and the $27 solution is superior. Use a short passphrase or PIN, and the $1657 solution is hopefully superior (though you have no true guarantee or way to know for sure). You are paying >$1k for the convenience of using a short passphrase, and in exchange you have to trust the manufacturer. Give me a megabuck or two and I bet I have a good chance of getting your files out of an IronKey. Give me a megabuck or two and I can do nothing against software encryption with a 32-character passphrase. If I'm lucky I might even find an IronKey exploit that can be performed for much cheaper. Finding physical exploits (e.g. power, EMI, or even optical glitching attacks, nevermind stuff like pure firmware exploits) is much easier than breaking proper crypto. By the way, the same trade-off exists with Android (in old school FDE mode) vs iPhone secure enclave stuff. The iPhone solution has many advantages for many use cases, but if we're talking strictly about security of data at rest (i.e. from a powered off state) I trust my rooted Android with a long FDE passphrase over any iPhone. The latter only entangles a subset of user data with the lockscreen code, and does not allow you to set a separate longer boot-time passphrase from the normal unlock code (nor does regular Android, but you can do it with root). (disclaimer: it's been years since I looked at IronKeys and had this thought experiment; at the time they definitely made no claims of deriving the encryption key from your passphrase and I seem to recall reading somewhere that they don't, but I haven't checked their marketing these days)

6y ago

1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago

Perhaps the buyer is not paying, she is only the purchaser. The purchase is actually paid for by taxpayers.

Hackbraten 6y ago

To put it into perspective, Kingston offers other sizes down to 4 GB, which cost about one tenth. Depending of your use case and what kind of data you want to store, I think it’s reasonably cheap for the added convenience. I own a 1 GB IronKey myself (purchased back in 2008 when I worked as an IT contractor for a German telecommunications company). Mine sadly no longer works under current macOS versions but other than that, I remember being quite happy with it.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

haunter 6y ago

> I'm impressed that they got a USB stick past Level 3 testing. Guess: maybe there are tiny wires in the casing and an "intrusion detection" chip with its own battery that is never powered off so that it can monitor for breakage of the wires and trigger a wipe? Now I want to see a teardown of this USB stick

saagarjha 6y ago
Little did you know, it achieved that level by wiping the mind of the person tampering with it rather than wiping itself.
- switch11 6y ago
  This is likelier than the alternatives
- aasasd 6y ago
  Now I'm vaguely curious as to whether FIPS postulates that the devices must not have explosives and nerve gas as the tamper protection.
mschuster91 6y ago
I can imagine this... two extremely thin foils separated by an insulating layer, one connected to a supercap charged at 100V at every time the stick is plugged in, the other layer connected to all pins of the flash memory via diodes. Then, encase the whole thing in epoxy. When someone attempts to cut it open now, the short between the foils will discharge the supercap to fry the memory.
- dathinab 6y ago
  Sounds plausible especially given that most likely frying the view bytes containing the AES key is enough. (Most systems have a stored AES key which then again is encrypted e.g. with a password).
- Someone 6y ago
  You can also wrap it in something that reacts vehemently with oxygen and wrap that in a thin foil. That may last longer than that capacitor and, I guess, is less easily defeated (does that charge fry the stored bits or only the logic for reading and writing it? How do you defend against Evie carefully drilling into the epoxy until contact with the charge is made?) A step up is two chemicals that don’t need oxygen (prevents Evie from opening the device in a nitrogen atmosphere). Bonus points if they only explode when depressurized, as then, you can mix them inside the device. I think techniques like those have been used in safes, but can’t find a link. I did find https://people.kth.se/~msmith/is2500_pdf/Anti-Tamper%20Techniques_elena.pdf https://people.kth.se/~msmith/is2500_pdf/Anti-Tamper%20Techn..., which discusses this use case. It mentions detecting attempts to X-ray the device, and even mentions using explosives (with a remark “this option is not practical for consumer electronics”). I guess that is not a problem in military hardware (if a F-35 falls into enemy hands, destroying its software probably is more important than destroying the plane)

amelius 6y ago

I think this is just a misunderstanding: the ad got targeted at the wrong person.

tinco 6y ago

Many people assume that if they're seeing something that's more expensive than they're used to that they're being ripped off for some reason. Ripping people off with high prices is actually very rare nowadays, mostly thanks to the big online marketplaces. These large price differentials are purely due to the insane economies of scale we're able to create. It's not a wonder that there's a 128GB USB stick as expensive as $1675, it's a wonder there's a 128GB USB stick as cheap as $27. Imagine it took 1 million dollars to develop the tech and implement the manufacturing process of a 128GB stick. Assume they cost $5 to manufacture, and $20 to market and ship. Then when you sell a million you've recuperated your R&D and made a million profit that warrants the 6 million upfront investment you had to do. Same story but now with the expensive 128GB sticks, of which you're only going to sell 1000. Even though the stick is 1675, you only make 1.650.000, so your effective budget to develop the fancy encryption scheme and make a profit is 650.000.

saagarjha 6y ago
I take it you haven’t seen “diamond plated HMDI cables” on Amazon that retail for hundreds of dollars?
TonyTrapp 6y ago
I keep telling this to friends who complained that hard disk manufacturers are plotting against them by not lowering hard disk prices long after floods have damaged hard disk factories. You have to consider how absolutely incredibly cheap this stuff actually is. Take a high-quality wooden shelf. It's just a couple of wood boards, right? Yet it may cost ten times more than a USB stick or even an embedded development board. It's crazy.
- beagle3 6y ago
  And the Doctors. You have to consider that $500 for a 15 minute visit at the doctor is ridiculously cheap, given the reduction in pain / the increase in productivity you usually gain from following their advice! /s Yes, some stuff seems to be unreasonably cheap or expensive in some context. But it's the market that prices it, and collusion is always bad for everyone (except the conspirators).

Grustaf 6y ago

The cheap one can’t be used as a harddrive since the write speed is 30 times slower. For reading the difference is 4x. So they are pretty different products.

martin_a 6y ago

From the answers: > FIPS 140-2 Level 3 is more than just encryption. It requires the device to be tested by a cryptography testing lab that is certified to perform this testing on behalf of the US government. So, this will likely contain backdoors for the US government, so I should NOT buy this item after all if I want my data to be really secure and instead go for software encryption...

cduzz 6y ago
Is there something stopping you from using the fips 140-2 box and also using strong software encryption on top of that? I imagine doing so would have the advantage that trivial examination of the device would be impossible.
- martin_a 6y ago
  Well, the OP on Stack Overflow was asking what the benefit of using a FIPS-secured device is. The hardware encryption itself is probably not enough if you want to keep your stuff secure from the US government. So you can fall back to software encryption right from the start. No need to spend lots of money on the hardware piece, except you need a "tinkering proof" device.

_trampeltier 6y ago

When I see topics like this one, I allways wonder, why there is not an univeral standard for USB-Stick encryption. I would not matter what OS, just ask for the passphrase when you insert the stick.

mouzogu 6y ago

The amount of caveats in his question made me laugh. This guy certainly knows his audience.

a5withtrrs 6y ago

As of a few years ago (2009 ish) the important chips in an IronKey were AT98SC032CT-USB and OnSpec xSil 269. I've got an old one kicking around somewhere. I'll tear it down and post pictures in the near future.

motohagiography 6y ago

Can tell you from experience in healthcare, the difference between a regular usb stick and one that has a verifiable security level is that if you lose track of a stick with a research data set on it, it's the difference between doing local incident response, and individually notifying 1m+ people their health information has been breached. If it's on a USB stick, you've already lost control, but there was a case at a hospital where they avoided that cost because the lost device was encrypted.

tke248 6y ago

The difference with Ironkeys are you can remotely deactivate/erase them.

vngzs 6y ago

FIPS 140-2 level 3 128GB flash drives are available for $223.39[0]. I don't know why you'd pay $1,665. [0]: https://www.cdw.com/product/kingston-datatraveler-4000-g2-management-ready-usb-flash-drive-128-gb/6155875 https://www.cdw.com/product/kingston-datatraveler-4000-g2-ma...

AntiImperialist 6y ago

The most important part of the pricing is the intended consumer. It is expected to be used by government officials and employees of big companies, for whom, the price is not a big factor. Then comes the competition. Not a lot of companies are making these. The next one is volume. They're not going to sell as many of these so they produce them at a much lower scale, driving the cost per unit up. Then comes everything else.

thrower123 6y ago

I didn't know people still required FIPS. Microsoft has been recommending disabling it for years in Windows - about a decade ago I would sometimes run into issues where the standard DotNet AES encryption wouldn't work on FIPS boxes, but I haven't seen that particular issue in a long time.

qwerty456127 6y ago

Even without FIPS, encrypted USB drives are about an order of magnitude more expensive than non-encrypred ones. I actually want an encrypted one to set me free from having to use VeraCrypt so I could enjoy the convenience of the plug-and-play experience while being sure a random person to find my drive if I loose it won't get the data. Perhaps I could just use BitLocker but it's not available in Windows 10 Home (like if home PCs didn't contain any sensitive data).

mcguire 6y ago

This thread seems to involve many people who have taken ECON 101 and think it corresponds with reality. For example: "If you got to a gas station near me, you can get a CR2032 battery for say 2 USD. If you got to a certain home decor/equipment store a mile away, you'll get 4 of these batteries for 1 USD. That's what, 8x more expensive for a relatively common product?" This isn't a difference between .25¢ for 1 and $2 for one. It is the difference between $4 and a bit of a search for 1 plus three more to stuff in a drawer and $2 for one here now where you are. And $2 is the cost of, what, a couple ounces of coffee? This is what ECON 101 calls irrationality.

annoyingnoob 6y ago

The benefit is that you are compliant when the Government contract you are working on requires FIPS encrypted devices. You cannot be compliant with your Government contract unless you use the kind of encryption the contract specifies. You are paying for the certificate, not for the software. Its not easy to become FIPS certified, there are costs.

dpc_pw 6y ago

From my PoV, FIPS is bureaucratic nonsense and people trusting in it deserve what they are getting. It might have had sense a long time ago, to ensure that vendors don't do something ridiculous and call it a day. It does mandate certain thing that are common sense and good practice, yes. But you can't really mandate security via a checklists from 10 years ago. Government can't keep up with cryptography, software bugs being discovered, new threats and so on. It's just too slow, and requires more than just going through a checklist. The exact details of how things are done at the lower level are simply insane. It's very common that the FIPS-certified product has security strictly lower than non certified one, e.g. because the certified FIPS base had bugs, that are known, trivial to get fixed (3-liners, etc) but can't because that would take months/years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to re-certify the whole codebase being patched. The whole thing was probably created by lobbyists to create another corrupted channel to monopolize and overcharge government and related institutions, just like many other nonsensical laws in the US.

dang 6y ago

The submitted title ("Why pay $1657 for a $27 USB stick?") broke the site guidelines by editorializing. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, which includes: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

fdye 6y ago

So I can give a real life example of the type of customer that uses these exclusively. My previous employment was leading development on a media scanning station, a bit like an ATM, but with a lot of ports in front to accept USBs, CDROM, etc. We provided this product to the energy, defense, pharmaceutical, etc sectors. Essentially critical infrastructure. Many of our customers utilize air-gaps to isolate their critical systems. So to get files into those systems you basically have to sneaker net it, usually using portable media of some kind. The basic procedure using our product was to take an "unknown" piece of media with the files you wanna move over. Slot it into our station, then grab a "known" piece of media and put it into the other port on the station. The station would scan all of the files using several commercial AVs, then files deemed to be clean would be copied to the "known" piece of media. The important thing about the "known" piece of media is that its generally one of these expensive USBs with FIPS encryption, and crucially the FIPS epoxy and digitally signed firmware on the controller. Often these facilities are like onions with several layers of security, and this procedure must be done several times to get to the truly sensitive equipment, along with guards checking receipts and unlocking media from lockboxes, etc. Having everyone at the facility using the same drive, especially if you can purchase in known serial numbers, is good practice. That way anyone using a different model drive is easily spotted and programmatically you can lockdown to those known serials before mounting. Similarly if someone tries to take it apart the FIPS epoxy should destroy the internals of the microcontroller. They drill through the epoxy and flash the firmware, the microcontroller in these drives will reject cause it is not signed. Finally, if they do manage to build an exact replica, with the correct serials but some nasty internals, it wont matter since they are forced to use a "known" drive before stepping up to the next security level (the bad drives gets left at the low security gap). Its not perfect, but it does build defense in depth, especially with more mundane things added into the mix like FBI background checks, etc. You quickly get into mission impossible scenarios requiring physical agents gaining access to reach the inner layers of these critical systems.

asdz 6y ago

This remind me of a question during my last interview: "Why should we hire you when you are X times more expensive than a fresh graduate?"