What is the benefit of having FIPS hardware-level encryption on a USB stick?(security.stackexchange.com)
security.stackexchange.com
What is the benefit of having FIPS hardware-level encryption on a USB stick?
https://security.stackexchange.com/q/241202/50573
174 comments
> Ripping people off with high prices is actually very rare nowadays, mostly thanks to the big online marketplaces.
This is so absolutely untrue that this reads like a joke.
> 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.
Yes, because it's so absurdly common. "High price ripoffs" are so common that it's the default mode of operation for nearly every company in America. "High price ripoffs" are so common, that it's literally taught in school as a fundamental part of all marketing. (Price anchoring, premium pricing, skimming pricing, are all just 'high-price rip-offs' applied practically).
Yes, it still occasionally happens, but the days of "a high price probably means better time/materials/quality" are long gone. 9 times out of 10, the high price product is identical to the cheap price one, and the higher price is explicitly just a ripoff.
This is so absolutely untrue that this reads like a joke.
> 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.
Yes, because it's so absurdly common. "High price ripoffs" are so common that it's the default mode of operation for nearly every company in America. "High price ripoffs" are so common, that it's literally taught in school as a fundamental part of all marketing. (Price anchoring, premium pricing, skimming pricing, are all just 'high-price rip-offs' applied practically).
Yes, it still occasionally happens, but the days of "a high price probably means better time/materials/quality" are long gone. 9 times out of 10, the high price product is identical to the cheap price one, and the higher price is explicitly just a ripoff.
I'll give a practical 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? Gas stations and convenience stores in my country routinely charge 500-1000% more for common products because, and here's the gist of it I'm sure for most store/chain owners, "why not"?
You are paying extra for the service the gas station is providing which is that they shipped and stored the batteries in a location close to your home. The gas station is probably also open longer than the big box store.
It’s even in the name. You’re paying for ... convenience. That’s why things are more expensive per unit.
A) they are closer to where you live. And B) in smaller unit packs. Maybe you only need one battery, but to get them cheaper (per unit) you need to buy an 8-pack.
If a one pack is $2, but an 8-pack is $0.50/ per battery. If you only need one, you’re still better off paying four times as much ($2 < $4).
It’s all about the convenience...
A) they are closer to where you live. And B) in smaller unit packs. Maybe you only need one battery, but to get them cheaper (per unit) you need to buy an 8-pack.
If a one pack is $2, but an 8-pack is $0.50/ per battery. If you only need one, you’re still better off paying four times as much ($2 < $4).
It’s all about the convenience...
The store where the price is low also needs it shipped and stored, and is also close to my home. So that's definitely not a reason.
Did you mean "convenience makes the price higher"? No quarrel there! The issue is how much higher. 8x more expensive (as an example) is in the "ripping me off" territory, if you ask me :)
Did you mean "convenience makes the price higher"? No quarrel there! The issue is how much higher. 8x more expensive (as an example) is in the "ripping me off" territory, if you ask me :)
Real estate prices for a big box store and small convenience store are totally different.
Wait until you find out the cost of producing most non-alcoholic beverages...
Wait until you find out the cost of producing most non-alcoholic beverages...
A bit more than water but not much, may I guess? Transporting and storage and the waiter/ress is the real cost?
Fountain drinks are produced on-site using tap water and concentrated syrup. Transport and shipping cost is low since the syrup doesn't take up much space. A typical fast food soda (any size) costs about 15-20 cents for the cup and soda, and is sold for $1 on the low end. Larger chains can optimize the price down to 5-10 cents on the most popular sodas. Labor costs are insignificant if the customer self-serves from the fountain.
Ok, thanks. I previously assume the drinks were in coke cans, but now when you mention cups instead, and self serving, it's more obvious to me how the drinks can be that inexpensive.
The subsidies from high-fructose corn syrup etc, may even make the production of fizzy drinks less than water.
The gas station also probably pays more per square foot of real estate.
Maybe you're a little bit more of a sceptic than I am. Strategies like price anchoring, premium pricing and other kinds of artificial product segmentation are ways to derive maximum value from a wider range of customers. I don't consider them a way to rip off people.
If you've got a monopoly, sure this can lead to price gauging. But in a competitive market it just means you are rewarded for your edge.
Anyway, I've only felt like I was ripped off on price a couple times. And every time it was buying something in a higher end brick & mortar store where I bought a quality item at significant mark up. Brick and mortar stores simply are something that's a luxury that is hard to justify if you're on a shoestring budget.
If you've got a monopoly, sure this can lead to price gauging. But in a competitive market it just means you are rewarded for your edge.
Anyway, I've only felt like I was ripped off on price a couple times. And every time it was buying something in a higher end brick & mortar store where I bought a quality item at significant mark up. Brick and mortar stores simply are something that's a luxury that is hard to justify if you're on a shoestring budget.
" Derive maximum value" is the technical term for ripping people off. Nothing said about delivering value, just how much "value" can I suck out before they walk away from the table.
As opposed to purposely underpaying compared to the fair value and therefore ripping businesses off?
Or is that fine because a business can't starve (even though its owners might?)
Or is that fine because a business can't starve (even though its owners might?)
> Ripping people off with high prices is actually very rare nowadays
Given how many dropshippers exist for goods straight from China at 10-15x the price (if not more), this is untrue to such a degree that the original sentence almost reads like satire.
Given how many dropshippers exist for goods straight from China at 10-15x the price (if not more), this is untrue to such a degree that the original sentence almost reads like satire.
Apple charge $200 between a 256GB and 512GB SSD. Sales & Marketing would call this "price anchoring"
I think the premise is that you can look up a item on Amazon, ebay, and walmart and between the three you're very unlikely to get ripped off if you buy the cheapest one available. If you Google for sunglasses, click the first advertisement, and buy without any cross shopping then sure you can absolutely get ripped off. But if you're that unsophisticated with shopping in general I don't know what to tell you
The original statement said the activity itself was rare. That it can be mitigated even when it is not rare is not in dispute, I think by anyone. That this is necessary, must always be done and is logical is a case I don't find compelling though.
> I think the premise is that you can look up a item on Amazon, ebay, and walmart and between the three you're very unlikely to get ripped off if you buy the cheapest one available.
I doubt it's an issue with Walmart but you have completely ignored the problem of counterfeit/knock-off goods on Amazon and eBay. From painful experience, although fortunately not with anything too expensive, I can tell you that it's absolutely possible - likely, even, if you buy enough stuff - to get ripped off on Amazon in this way and that your strategy is not a reliable way to avoid being ripped off.
I doubt it's an issue with Walmart but you have completely ignored the problem of counterfeit/knock-off goods on Amazon and eBay. From painful experience, although fortunately not with anything too expensive, I can tell you that it's absolutely possible - likely, even, if you buy enough stuff - to get ripped off on Amazon in this way and that your strategy is not a reliable way to avoid being ripped off.
Co-mingling inventory resulting in plausibly deniable (from the counterfeiters perceptive) for counterfeit merchandise is an Amazon specific (as far as I know) problem.
Walmart, Ebay and damn near every other ecommerce platform have things set up in a way that it's clear who's goods wound up on who's doorstep and therefore counterfeit stuff isn't very much of a problem. You can absolutely buy terrible Chinese knockoff products engineered to within an inch of their life (I do it all the time) but it's vanishingly rare (compared to Amazon) to get a genuine "I paid for X and got inferior knockoff Y" situation on any other eCommerce platform.
Walmart, Ebay and damn near every other ecommerce platform have things set up in a way that it's clear who's goods wound up on who's doorstep and therefore counterfeit stuff isn't very much of a problem. You can absolutely buy terrible Chinese knockoff products engineered to within an inch of their life (I do it all the time) but it's vanishingly rare (compared to Amazon) to get a genuine "I paid for X and got inferior knockoff Y" situation on any other eCommerce platform.
Every time I buy cheap crap directly from China I regret it. Not waiting 30 days for shipping is easily worth paying 5€ for a product that sells for 2€ directly from China. You can often find the same Chinese stuff at a brick and mortar shop for a reasonable price (2x at most) but its sold under the budget store brand.
The high quality products from China are often branded by an American or European company. You can't buy them directly from China unless it is a knockoff and a lot of knockoffs are sold on Ebay locally. I don't even know why anyone would bother to get stuff directly from aliexpress at this point.
The high quality products from China are often branded by an American or European company. You can't buy them directly from China unless it is a knockoff and a lot of knockoffs are sold on Ebay locally. I don't even know why anyone would bother to get stuff directly from aliexpress at this point.
I buy lots of stuff from Aliexpress! It's usually lots of low-stakes stuff like bullet journal stuff, pins, phone cases, magnets, small electronics parts, stones, christmas decorations, baking supplies.
But I think our experience differs in that I'm really happy with the quality. Once you start checking Aliexpress for stuff you're about to buy you see just how much stuff in stores is just rebranded bulk orders from Alibaba at a huge markup. I think the most egregious example I found was a tapestry from Urban Outfitters. They were selling it for $50+ and it was on Aliexpress for $3.
But I think our experience differs in that I'm really happy with the quality. Once you start checking Aliexpress for stuff you're about to buy you see just how much stuff in stores is just rebranded bulk orders from Alibaba at a huge markup. I think the most egregious example I found was a tapestry from Urban Outfitters. They were selling it for $50+ and it was on Aliexpress for $3.
Not really, drop shipping from China has 0 barrier to entry so the margin will be competed downwards very quickly.
I wasn't quoting a hypothetical. I can look at a storefront right now and see that I am correct. What you imply here has not happened.
A perfect example of Econ 101 reasoning gone awry. It is funny how often people will deny things sitting right in front of them because "that wouldn't happen".
Two economists are walking down the street, and one says "Look, there's a $20 bill on the ground over there!"
The other economist replies "Nonsense, if there was then someone would have already picked it up by now."
The other economist replies "Nonsense, if there was then someone would have already picked it up by now."
You'd think so and I really doubt it's as profitable as people suggest but even just looking at Amazon you can see many of the exact same products you'd find on AliExpress for far higher prices.
If you start importing from china - you must be certain that you can unload the product. Or you are stuck with 12 000 masticating juicers ...
Dropshippers provide valuable service - I can get item in 2 days (on Amazon) versus 2-3 weeks or longer if I buy on Aliexpress. Express shipping (if available) on Aliexpress is often $100+ for item that cost a few dollars.
Also margins are getting squeezed on drop shipping. Several years ago the difference between price on Amazon and Aliexpress was very significant now it's often negligible and I just buy on Amazon.
Also margins are getting squeezed on drop shipping. Several years ago the difference between price on Amazon and Aliexpress was very significant now it's often negligible and I just buy on Amazon.
What you are describing is not dropshipping. When dropshipping the goods come from the manufacturer or some wholesaler (but explicitly not from you).
> Ripping people off with high prices is actually very rare nowadays
Apparently you have no idea of the audiophile market. I have someone swear that music doesn’t sound as nice when converted losslessly from WAV to AIFF/FLAC on whatever $$$$ gear he uses.
Apparently you have no idea of the audiophile market. I have someone swear that music doesn’t sound as nice when converted losslessly from WAV to AIFF/FLAC on whatever $$$$ gear he uses.
Elaborating on the audiophile market: you have audiophiles and audiofools. I consider myself a bit of an audiophile, your friend might be an audiofool... I have even heard someone claim that spotify sounds better than CD.
There is this audiophile article [0] that takes compares some different consumer level NAS devices. They used the same listening setup to play lossless audio files from different NAS devices. The article's authors perceived a difference in sound quality and characteristics, depending on the NAS and RAID configuration!
The article is a solid example of a placebo effect. The bitstream is identical between the setups.
When it comes down to digital to analog conversion, there's a lot of variables going on. I can definitely hear the difference between my laptop's headphone output and the headphone output of my prosumer-level audio interface. A more expensive audio interface might introduce measurably less cross-talk and noise. Some headphones will sound weak if the headphone amp is not powerful enough.
In other words: some people focus on things that are measurable. Others seem to be deliberately chasing the placebo effect of expensive equipment.
0. http://www.enjoythemusic.com/hificritic/vol5_no3/listening_t...
There is this audiophile article [0] that takes compares some different consumer level NAS devices. They used the same listening setup to play lossless audio files from different NAS devices. The article's authors perceived a difference in sound quality and characteristics, depending on the NAS and RAID configuration!
The article is a solid example of a placebo effect. The bitstream is identical between the setups.
When it comes down to digital to analog conversion, there's a lot of variables going on. I can definitely hear the difference between my laptop's headphone output and the headphone output of my prosumer-level audio interface. A more expensive audio interface might introduce measurably less cross-talk and noise. Some headphones will sound weak if the headphone amp is not powerful enough.
In other words: some people focus on things that are measurable. Others seem to be deliberately chasing the placebo effect of expensive equipment.
0. http://www.enjoythemusic.com/hificritic/vol5_no3/listening_t...
> I have even heard someone claim that spotify sounds better than CD.
This can be probably explained by different mastering between the two. CD releases were subject to loudness war. Spotify and other streaming services normalize volume, so there is no incentive to release louder, less dynamic range tracks.
This can be probably explained by different mastering between the two. CD releases were subject to loudness war. Spotify and other streaming services normalize volume, so there is no incentive to release louder, less dynamic range tracks.
Hey, off topic, but while you're here, this is a question I like to ask audiophiles when I come across them in the wild.
What entry level turntable and speakers would you buy for listening to vinyl in a standard living room and why?
What entry level turntable and speakers would you buy for listening to vinyl in a standard living room and why?
I don't really consider myself an audiophile, but I do love music and vinyl. My general suggestion if someone wants to buy new is an Audio-Technica LP 120X turntable and a pair of Klipsh R-51M bookshelf speakers. The 120x has most of the features a newbie will want/need, and the speakers are fairly low priced while still sounding pretty good (although they're not quite as punchy on the bass as I'd personally like). The setup will probably run around $500, but the turntable won't make mincemeat of your records like a cheapo Crosley.
Of course, the real answer is to find vintage equipment at a local audio place, but that isn't always easy for newbs and is a bit dependent on your local music nerd community.
Of course, the real answer is to find vintage equipment at a local audio place, but that isn't always easy for newbs and is a bit dependent on your local music nerd community.
That's one thing I've always wondered about with the vinyl scene. My dad's an audio enthusiast, and he once told me that when my mom and he had 2 incomes and no kids yet he bought a diamond tip for his record player for hundreds of dollars.
So that's a crazy thing that the thing that would make your record have the best audio quality, will also just rip into your record so bad it will probably also immediately be the last time you could listen to it at that quality.
He swapped his collection to CD's the second that became a reasonable option.
So that's a crazy thing that the thing that would make your record have the best audio quality, will also just rip into your record so bad it will probably also immediately be the last time you could listen to it at that quality.
He swapped his collection to CD's the second that became a reasonable option.
Normal digital setup is better then vinyl.
If you really want to play and use vinyl, you should try to read up on it yourself shopping around and experience it, otherwise you just have something at home because its hip to have it at home.
You might just like the weirder sound from your selection even more.
There are plenty of good youtube channels and videos showing you a varity on options you have to explore.
If you really want to play and use vinyl, you should try to read up on it yourself shopping around and experience it, otherwise you just have something at home because its hip to have it at home.
You might just like the weirder sound from your selection even more.
There are plenty of good youtube channels and videos showing you a varity on options you have to explore.
I have and do play vinyl, just for the nostalgia of sitting in my attic bedroom with the liner notes out in front of me and my shitty old headphones on when I was a teenager. I have done reading up and shopping around.
I also understand that I am not a good evaluator of audio items. I don't know, nor do I care about the lingo. I just want a good turntable, so I can get some of the old vinyl out for my small children. I think Thick as a Brick and Locomotive Breath are two things that absolutely need to be experienced in your youth.
And I can't break up my pot and roll a joint on the back of an mp3 player. (jokes)
That's why I've asked here for advice.
I also understand that I am not a good evaluator of audio items. I don't know, nor do I care about the lingo. I just want a good turntable, so I can get some of the old vinyl out for my small children. I think Thick as a Brick and Locomotive Breath are two things that absolutely need to be experienced in your youth.
And I can't break up my pot and roll a joint on the back of an mp3 player. (jokes)
That's why I've asked here for advice.
Powered studio monitors are usually a pretty good option. I'm a fan of the JBL LSR series (305 or 308 can be had for cheap on sale). The dispersion pattern of studio monitors may not work well for all rooms, but usually are pretty good. After that, room treatments are a bigger ROI than better speakers.
Yea, the group is both insane and amazing.
They have a conference in Vegas.
The sound from these setups are amazing.
I started to get into it, but there is always something to do that provides a slightly better experience. Even 40k setups have room for improvement
They have a conference in Vegas.
The sound from these setups are amazing.
I started to get into it, but there is always something to do that provides a slightly better experience. Even 40k setups have room for improvement
Is that ripping them off though? I'd say Audiophiles want to pay over the odds for things that might not even really make a difference if you actually measured it. It's part of the enjoyment for them.
Yes, it is. If I sell you quack medicines for thousands of dollars, but you BELIEVE they work, am I ripping you off?
Just because someone believes a con job doesn't make it less of a con job.
Just because someone believes a con job doesn't make it less of a con job.
We’re talking subjective experience of art, not medical efficacy. If someone thinks A sounds better than B, they are automatically correct for their ears.
That gets rather odd when at least one study [1] has indicated that a (as far as patient is concerned) more expensive placebo does have higher medical efficacy:
[1] https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2015/01/29/ex...
(links to paper)
[1] https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2015/01/29/ex...
(links to paper)
The difference there is that you can't measure how pleasing a given sound is to someone else, at least not in a generalized fashion that makes that conclusion have any meaning for anyone else.
Motor function is objectively measurable. "I like the sound of this" is not.
Motor function is objectively measurable. "I like the sound of this" is not.
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.
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).
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).
Hard drives are being price gouged. The prices on the low-end have stayed the same since pre-flood and the $/tb hasn't improved in a long time. Also the fact that the almost identical( and sometimes exactly identical down to serial number) externals often cost half as much as the internals( with only some extra warranty to cover the difference). It's a broken market.
Given the proliferation of lower-performing SMR drives, effective HDD prices have actually gone up rather than down. We're forced to pay the same price for grossly inferior products.
Only true for lower capacity drives. You can buy 14TB for <$14/TB while 1-2TB is still $30-45/TB.
The going price/capacity target for prosumer scale (>6TB) is $15/TB.
The going price/capacity target for prosumer scale (>6TB) is $15/TB.
Your shelf is so expensive, normally, because of physical laber.
While i agree that a hard drive cost can bottom out, i don't think we have bottomed out at the right price.
Why would it make sense, at all, to produce a 300gb drive in 2020? It doesn't. Are they using machines which are not able to create better plates in 3,5" sizes? If yes, they probably ride those machines for a long time. Should be paid of by now 10x
While i agree that a hard drive cost can bottom out, i don't think we have bottomed out at the right price.
Why would it make sense, at all, to produce a 300gb drive in 2020? It doesn't. Are they using machines which are not able to create better plates in 3,5" sizes? If yes, they probably ride those machines for a long time. Should be paid of by now 10x
The price of a 2 TB drive is the same as it was before the floods that were probably something like 10 years ago.
There's no excuse.
There's no excuse.
It's an excuse to buy an SSD.
And it's precisely what's responsible for falling HDD volumes and rising SDD volumes.
Which, in turn, is precisely what's responsible for stagnant HDD and falling SSD prices.
I can get a big-enough 480GB Sandisk SSD for $55 right now, and a 2TB SSD for $190, manufacturer direct. Looking at their WD_BLACK HDD, that's actually a buck cheaper than their 500GB HDD. For 2TB, I'd be looking at $99 instead of $190; at less than 2x the price difference, the SSD is a far better option for most people.
Of course, the HDD goes all the way up to 10TB (at $320), at which point, so it still comes out ahead for bulk storage. SSDs hit a breakpoint at 2TB, where price and complexity go up astronomically. I can either drop a few grand on a specialized product, or around $1000 on several drives and build a RAID. So there's still a market. Just not a particularly big one.
Prices are based on first sensible link on their web page (presumably, most popular product). You can go up or down in price if you click around, go off-brand, but the qualitative picture doesn't change. HDDs require a lot of infrastructure, and the market is evaporating.
I suspect the upper end will disappear soon enough.
I do still want some kind of bulk storage. I want to back up my photos somewhere reliable, but there seems little left. Tape is thousands of dollars for the hardware, while optical is now tiny. Nothing seems to compete with the volumes, economies-of-scale, or R&D budget of integrated circuits.
And it's precisely what's responsible for falling HDD volumes and rising SDD volumes.
Which, in turn, is precisely what's responsible for stagnant HDD and falling SSD prices.
I can get a big-enough 480GB Sandisk SSD for $55 right now, and a 2TB SSD for $190, manufacturer direct. Looking at their WD_BLACK HDD, that's actually a buck cheaper than their 500GB HDD. For 2TB, I'd be looking at $99 instead of $190; at less than 2x the price difference, the SSD is a far better option for most people.
Of course, the HDD goes all the way up to 10TB (at $320), at which point, so it still comes out ahead for bulk storage. SSDs hit a breakpoint at 2TB, where price and complexity go up astronomically. I can either drop a few grand on a specialized product, or around $1000 on several drives and build a RAID. So there's still a market. Just not a particularly big one.
Prices are based on first sensible link on their web page (presumably, most popular product). You can go up or down in price if you click around, go off-brand, but the qualitative picture doesn't change. HDDs require a lot of infrastructure, and the market is evaporating.
I suspect the upper end will disappear soon enough.
I do still want some kind of bulk storage. I want to back up my photos somewhere reliable, but there seems little left. Tape is thousands of dollars for the hardware, while optical is now tiny. Nothing seems to compete with the volumes, economies-of-scale, or R&D budget of integrated circuits.
>And it's precisely what's responsible for falling HDD volumes and rising SDD volumes.
Eh, I'd say that its because a SSD does 50,000 IOPS+ and HDDs do about 150. Once SSDs came out and started being mass produced that spelled the death of HDD in most devices. Dropping the price of HDDs to near 0 won't stop that.
Eh, I'd say that its because a SSD does 50,000 IOPS+ and HDDs do about 150. Once SSDs came out and started being mass produced that spelled the death of HDD in most devices. Dropping the price of HDDs to near 0 won't stop that.
At home I need about 20 TB of storage (without counting redundancy). I'm not rich enough to do that with SSDs.
And fwiw, HDD go up to 18 TB nowadays.
And fwiw, HDD go up to 18 TB nowadays.
I was comparing specific lines of drives -- mainstream lines from a major vendor (WD/Sandisk).
SSDs also go way up in size, but prices spike after you hit a corner.
SSDs also go way up in size, but prices spike after you hit a corner.
Cheapest ssd $/tb is x2-3 that of the cheapest hdd. That's still significant.
That'd actually be acceptable to me, since I wouldn't feel the need for redundancy--but it looks like the cheapest 1TB SSD that can be found is $67, while I can get HDDs for $15.88/TB. That's x4.2 the price of an HDD, definitely not practical for me.
Yes the cheapest ssd is more expensive /tb than the optimal one( which is ~1tb atm).
There's no reason to expect the price of a two-platter hard drive to go down over time, and hard drive tech has not quite improved enough to allow for 2TB from a single platter without using shingled magnetic recording. Drives with at least 1TB per platter appear to have been on the market since just after the floods (2011/2012).
I take it you haven’t seen “diamond plated HMDI cables” on Amazon that retail for hundreds of dollars?
> mostly thanks to the big online marketplaces.
I see you've never tried to shop online outside of the US.
Let's take an example; my daughter has an Easy Bake Oven - it's a little plastic oven with essentially a 100W heater inside, with a little tiny baking tray about the size of your cell phone. There's an optional "cupcake tray", which is again a tiny metal pan about the size of your phone, only Walmart up here in Canada sells the oven, but doesn't sell the cupcake pan.
Amazon.ca today has a cupcake pan for $52 [0] which a) is lower than I've seen it on Amazon.ca before and b) this isn't even the "real" one from the manufacturer, it's an after-market knock off. There's another one listed for $89. It's actually cheaper for me to buy the cupcake tray from Amazon.com [1] even with the $9 shipping and the currency conversion, and I get the cupcake tray and a second regular tray and a bunch of cupcake liners.
This is not the most egregious example I've seen by a long ways. I assume a lot of this isn't actually malice but instead robots trying to sell products and setting prices that are just clearly insane. I've seen products with 1000% markup over MSRP before, and sometimes it's stuff that's easy to buy locally. There's just a lot fewer sellers on amazon.ca, so it's easier for a robot to climb it's price to infinity with no competition.
(And that's not to say everything is like this in Canada - most common stuff is priced reasonably. But if you want something a little out of the ordinary or sometimes if the "main" seller of something goes out of stock, suddenly it costs you a kidney to get a kid's basketball hoop.)
[0](https://www.amazon.ca/Replacement-Cupcake-Muffin-Easy-Bake-U...) [1](https://www.amazon.com/Easy-Bake-Ultimate-Replacement-Cupcak...)
I see you've never tried to shop online outside of the US.
Let's take an example; my daughter has an Easy Bake Oven - it's a little plastic oven with essentially a 100W heater inside, with a little tiny baking tray about the size of your cell phone. There's an optional "cupcake tray", which is again a tiny metal pan about the size of your phone, only Walmart up here in Canada sells the oven, but doesn't sell the cupcake pan.
Amazon.ca today has a cupcake pan for $52 [0] which a) is lower than I've seen it on Amazon.ca before and b) this isn't even the "real" one from the manufacturer, it's an after-market knock off. There's another one listed for $89. It's actually cheaper for me to buy the cupcake tray from Amazon.com [1] even with the $9 shipping and the currency conversion, and I get the cupcake tray and a second regular tray and a bunch of cupcake liners.
This is not the most egregious example I've seen by a long ways. I assume a lot of this isn't actually malice but instead robots trying to sell products and setting prices that are just clearly insane. I've seen products with 1000% markup over MSRP before, and sometimes it's stuff that's easy to buy locally. There's just a lot fewer sellers on amazon.ca, so it's easier for a robot to climb it's price to infinity with no competition.
(And that's not to say everything is like this in Canada - most common stuff is priced reasonably. But if you want something a little out of the ordinary or sometimes if the "main" seller of something goes out of stock, suddenly it costs you a kidney to get a kid's basketball hoop.)
[0](https://www.amazon.ca/Replacement-Cupcake-Muffin-Easy-Bake-U...) [1](https://www.amazon.com/Easy-Bake-Ultimate-Replacement-Cupcak...)
I fondly recall an article in APC magazine from 2003, a review of Lindows OS, with a Live CD of it attached. “Combine it with a cheap-as-chips 128MB USB disk for $70” [that’s AUD], it said—
Now here we are, 17 years later, selling a thousand times the capacity at half the price.
(I also wondered, then and now, where the author sourced their fish and chips. This incongruity is why the phrase stuck in my head.)
Now here we are, 17 years later, selling a thousand times the capacity at half the price.
(I also wondered, then and now, where the author sourced their fish and chips. This incongruity is why the phrase stuck in my head.)
While whatever you said about economies of scale is 100% true, its the level 3 stuff that's increasing the cost, not storage.
Not that I necessarily disagree, but is Coca-Cola priced at cost + 15%?
> 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...
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...
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.
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.
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!
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”.
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”.
Which makes sense, you have big security teams with the job to do security stuff. Then you have software and business teams who trying to meet certain targets, where security is normally an afterthought.
It's even more hilarious that there is typically a disconnect between hardware and software management, so that you could have one dept buying this sort of war-resistant servers and then handing them off to a different, averagely-incompetent dept who will use them to run ancient exploit-ridden software with default passwords.
They are not going to such lengths to protect their data. They are going to such lengths to conform to regulations. Other organizations don't need to conform to regulations, so they put a fair price for their security (you might not agree with that price, of course).
I've worked for one of those companies. The root password was @R00t#
could be the same organization
> 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
Now I want to see a teardown of this USB stick
I've seen a level 3 SSD teardown before. They had a humidity sensor and a photovoltaic sensor oonboard. Cease was sealed, and any change detected by these sensors would initiate a key wipe from a battery and then a data wipe once the drive received power. Interesting stuff
Photo sensor is a no-brainer, as you can assume it's dark in there, but humidity is a nice treat as you don't know what the %RH in the housing will be.
Little did you know, it achieved that level by wiping the mind of the person tampering with it rather than wiping itself.
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.
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%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)
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%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)
Thanks for sharing that deck! The section on volatile memory retention time/temperature stood out to me:
for SRAM, at room temperature the data retention time varies from 0.1 to 10 sec
– cooling SRAM to -20oC increases the retention time to 1 sec to 17 min
– at -50oC the retention time is 10 sec to 10 hours
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).
Couldn't that be defeated by draining the battery, for example with low temperatures? Programming it to wipe itself when low on charge might cause other issues.
I think this answers the OP’s question: Conversations like this are really expensive to have.
Not if: low battery -> auto wipe
Also if the content is encrypted you don't need to auto wipe the 128GB, just auto wiping the AES key is enough.
EDIT: To clarify: Many systems like that have a stored AES key for the data encryption which then again is encrypted e.g. "with a password".
Also if the content is encrypted you don't need to auto wipe the 128GB, just auto wiping the AES key is enough.
EDIT: To clarify: Many systems like that have a stored AES key for the data encryption which then again is encrypted e.g. "with a password".
That would mitigate one of the issues with auto-wiping (because the owner could store a copy of the key elsewhere and use it to recover the data if a false positive happened), but it should be explained very clearly to the user.
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.
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.
>stackoverflow page comparing hash algorithms (from crc32 md5 xxhash to sha) thru patterns it generated onto an image.
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/145633
>Also answers by the zlib guy
https://stackoverflow.com/a/20765054
https://stackoverflow.com/users/1180620/mark-adler
>the nagle algorithm guy
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Animats
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/145633
>Also answers by the zlib guy
https://stackoverflow.com/a/20765054
https://stackoverflow.com/users/1180620/mark-adler
>the nagle algorithm guy
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Animats
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. :))
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. :))
It's not sincere. It's clearly worded that it could work for virtually any sort of content on HN
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!
I'm sure some of my own comments could also be misconstrued as 'fake comments' applying to virtually any submission!
I don’t think so. Not everything linked here seems stupid at first glance, and the comment clearly says that this does.
You're replying to a comment with item id 25196754, and your link has item id 25196874, which comes later.
[deleted]
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.
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.
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.
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.
Did you read the top answer? Level 3 compliance doesn't sound trivial at all.
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.
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.
I'd love to read about that device of yours and how you managed to get such a certification.
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
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
So in your experience is the price for this USB drive justified?
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.
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.
Say, if encryption isn't done on the device itself, then it wouldn't need to be tamper proof would it?
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.
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.
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!
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!
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).
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).
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.
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.
You're confusing requirements with implementation. Sure, you don't have to douse your motherboard in epoxy, just find an equivalent implementation to fulfill the same requirements* . Still damn difficult.
* Vials of fluoroantimonic acid affixed to the device with slabs of C4 and high voltage tripwires?
* Vials of fluoroantimonic acid affixed to the device with slabs of C4 and high voltage tripwires?
The certification lab is going to want words with you, if they survive.
"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."
Have you considered contacting NIST to get certified? You could get in on the action.
Have you considered contacting NIST to get certified? You could get in on the action.
It was not possible because FIPS mandates use of certain crypto systems (and to NOT use others), and our application domain—bitcoin private key management—required the use of non-standard cryptography. According to the lawyers we talked to, we couldn’t meet both needs.
In my experience with the government, a waiver is probably possible though. But none of our customers were demanding FIPS certification.
In my experience with the government, a waiver is probably possible though. But none of our customers were demanding FIPS certification.
How would you defeat that if it's supposed to be so easy?
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.
That's just off the top of my head.
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.
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.
>>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.
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.
I'm sure they have but the US military only buys from the US so that cuts out most manufacturers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Interestingly, you can slap just about anything you want in a bus without a second thought.
Most off-the-shelf hardware isn't going to pass EN50121. Your hardware might be buggy and user unfriendly, but a 8KV chassis discharge isn't going to take it out.
Indeed. I understand why some of this is necessary, but a lot of it seems to be a kind of process bleed, where "how we do things" in on part of the system just gets copied across without any real thought as to whether it's really necessary across the whole system.
One of the more interesting aspects of working in safety critical software was the thought that went into how to architect a system to minimise the amount of it that needed to be built to the highest standards so that we could focus the effort in the most effective way.
One of the more interesting aspects of working in safety critical software was the thought that went into how to architect a system to minimise the amount of it that needed to be built to the highest standards so that we could focus the effort in the most effective way.
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.
"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.
The answer to « Why does X with Y certification costs Z ? » generally comes down to insurance.
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.
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.
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)
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)
> 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.
If you never power-up your phone maybe. But in any realistic usage scenario you're way insecure with a rooted Android phone. Check this link, it's a quick read.
https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/android.html
If you never power-up your phone maybe. But in any realistic usage scenario you're way insecure with a rooted Android phone. Check this link, it's a quick read.
https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/android.html
That whole article is massive fear mongering.
> If an attacker has managed to compromise the entire system and gain extremely high privileges, verified boot will revert their changes upon reboot and ensure they cannot persist.
Unlocking the bootloader chiefly means you are insecure against evil-maid attacks. If your phone is compromised via software badly enough that they can flash the OS, the attacker has all your data already. And if they pwned you like that, they can pwn you again, and also, who ever powers off their phone except when the battery runs out? Besides, data-only persistence exploits aren't hard to find. Since I use FDE, an evil-maid attack will at least leave behind the evidence of a powered off phone, and if they just steal it they get nothing.
> Verified boot is not just for physical security as many people assume. Its main purpose is protection against remote attackers and the physical security is a nice side-effect.
As I said, that's BS because that assumes people power off their phones, which they don't.
> An attacker can fake user input by for example, clickjacking
That only works if you give apps Accessibility permission. Which nobody sane does for anything but extremely trustworthy apps.
> The majority of custom ROMs ruin the security model by disabling verified boot, using userdebug builds, disabling SELinux, not including firmware updates, and a lot more. A common ROM that does many of these is LineageOS.
LineageOS isn't one ROM, it's many ports for many devices, and as far as I know most of the decent ones include firmware updates and absolutely do not disable SELinux (are there even any that still do that?). I haven't used a LineageOS build without SELinux in at least 6 or 7 years. Verified boot has to be disabled to allow for add-ons, but we've already covered how that isn't that big of a deal except against evil-maid attacks. As for userdebug, the only thing that does is enable root via ADB - but then LineageOS gives you a toggle to disable it in the settings. And since ADB access is secured via a secure key exchange, you can only use it after a permission prompt or from a previously authorized host.
Also, LineageOS doesn't even come with root these days. It's an optional add-on. You can just uninstall it and away goes root.
> It does not implement rollback protection so an attacker can downgrade the OS to an old version and exploit already patched vulnerabilities
Oh, really? Well, I tried downgrading LineageOS recently, and it refused to unlock my FDE, presumably as the Keymaster implementation noticed and said nope.
> It does not include firmware updates which prevents you from getting new patches to fix vulnerabilities.
Again, this is device-specific and a meaningless generalization. LineageOS isn't one ROM, it's many ROMs for many devices. Which one are they talking about? Back when I was using a Nexus device, LineageOS builds didn't include firmware but were tied to certain firmware versions and prompted you to pull those updates from factory builds to match, which I always did to make sure my firmware was up to date.
Yes, there are more security-focused ROMs like GrapheneOS, and yes, Pixel/Nexus devices are usually the reference for serious security in the Android space (I'm actually waiting for LineageOS support to get a Pixel 4a). But saying "rooting your phone kills security" is a fearmongering generalization. Rooting your phone doesn't mean you give every app root access, it means you give yourself root access.
> If an attacker has managed to compromise the entire system and gain extremely high privileges, verified boot will revert their changes upon reboot and ensure they cannot persist.
Unlocking the bootloader chiefly means you are insecure against evil-maid attacks. If your phone is compromised via software badly enough that they can flash the OS, the attacker has all your data already. And if they pwned you like that, they can pwn you again, and also, who ever powers off their phone except when the battery runs out? Besides, data-only persistence exploits aren't hard to find. Since I use FDE, an evil-maid attack will at least leave behind the evidence of a powered off phone, and if they just steal it they get nothing.
> Verified boot is not just for physical security as many people assume. Its main purpose is protection against remote attackers and the physical security is a nice side-effect.
As I said, that's BS because that assumes people power off their phones, which they don't.
> An attacker can fake user input by for example, clickjacking
That only works if you give apps Accessibility permission. Which nobody sane does for anything but extremely trustworthy apps.
> The majority of custom ROMs ruin the security model by disabling verified boot, using userdebug builds, disabling SELinux, not including firmware updates, and a lot more. A common ROM that does many of these is LineageOS.
LineageOS isn't one ROM, it's many ports for many devices, and as far as I know most of the decent ones include firmware updates and absolutely do not disable SELinux (are there even any that still do that?). I haven't used a LineageOS build without SELinux in at least 6 or 7 years. Verified boot has to be disabled to allow for add-ons, but we've already covered how that isn't that big of a deal except against evil-maid attacks. As for userdebug, the only thing that does is enable root via ADB - but then LineageOS gives you a toggle to disable it in the settings. And since ADB access is secured via a secure key exchange, you can only use it after a permission prompt or from a previously authorized host.
Also, LineageOS doesn't even come with root these days. It's an optional add-on. You can just uninstall it and away goes root.
> It does not implement rollback protection so an attacker can downgrade the OS to an old version and exploit already patched vulnerabilities
Oh, really? Well, I tried downgrading LineageOS recently, and it refused to unlock my FDE, presumably as the Keymaster implementation noticed and said nope.
> It does not include firmware updates which prevents you from getting new patches to fix vulnerabilities.
Again, this is device-specific and a meaningless generalization. LineageOS isn't one ROM, it's many ROMs for many devices. Which one are they talking about? Back when I was using a Nexus device, LineageOS builds didn't include firmware but were tied to certain firmware versions and prompted you to pull those updates from factory builds to match, which I always did to make sure my firmware was up to date.
Yes, there are more security-focused ROMs like GrapheneOS, and yes, Pixel/Nexus devices are usually the reference for serious security in the Android space (I'm actually waiting for LineageOS support to get a Pixel 4a). But saying "rooting your phone kills security" is a fearmongering generalization. Rooting your phone doesn't mean you give every app root access, it means you give yourself root access.
You are not the customer. The customer is someone who needs to roll this out to parts of their organization, they cannot depend on their users being able to setup secure crypto on their own or together with IT. They need something ready to use.
The is also a cover your ass perspective. If their homerolled solution had issues they had the problem, if this usbkey have the issue they can point to that they bought certified parts.
The is also a cover your ass perspective. If their homerolled solution had issues they had the problem, if this usbkey have the issue they can point to that they bought certified parts.
When I was working in the military industrial complex we paid Red Hat for Linux even though we'd never have been able to use their support. The reason was that "Freeware" wasn't allowed on the servers. Sometimes the appearance of propriety to people who don't understand the issue can become very important.
Is it only appearance though ? When using free open-source software, the license always disclaim any warranty or liability related to the use of the software (the famous THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS"... paragraph).
When buying the same software from a vendor, the contract may include not only warranty & support but also some level of liability in the event of a software/security/design flaw.
When buying the same software from a vendor, the contract may include not only warranty & support but also some level of liability in the event of a software/security/design flaw.
> When using free open-source software, the license always disclaim any warranty or liability related to the use of the software
Have you find any proprietary operating system that doesn't come with that phrase? The only pieces of software that don't have something like this are very expensive consulting-first specialized ones.
Have you find any proprietary operating system that doesn't come with that phrase? The only pieces of software that don't have something like this are very expensive consulting-first specialized ones.
Isn't it a question of where you put your trust? For the software solution you have to trust the computer and its file encryption utilities. For the hardware solution you have to trust the USB stick.
Although one could assert that data coming from an untrusted computer might be already compromised. It might not be the case for an air gapped system.
Or you can trust different aspects of the computer at a different level. You can trust it for its normal functions but maybe it doesn't get regular updates for file encryption utilities and USB mass storage drivers. Sometimes you still need to fetch data from it using trusted USB devices.
Threat models can be complicated, also it makes sense to apply defense in depth.
Although one could assert that data coming from an untrusted computer might be already compromised. It might not be the case for an air gapped system.
Or you can trust different aspects of the computer at a different level. You can trust it for its normal functions but maybe it doesn't get regular updates for file encryption utilities and USB mass storage drivers. Sometimes you still need to fetch data from it using trusted USB devices.
Threat models can be complicated, also it makes sense to apply defense in depth.
If your software is compromised it can already read or write it whatever it wants off of an IronKey, or fire off a passphrase change request behind the scenes and replace your passphrase with an insecure one to render the physical device insecure, at which point it is equivalent to a $27 USB stick.
Perhaps in an enterprise setting with physical controls and air gaps you might be able to have a device require a different admin PIN to change the passphrase, avoiding the latter scenario of data exfiltration, but then the device has to be explicitly designed with this in mind to avoid any other exfiltration channels for the true PIN and I don't think IronKeys claim to do this (I don't even know if they support such a split admin PIN). And besides, you probably have bigger problems if your air gapped computer is compromised anyway.
Really, IronKeys and their ilk cater to corporate and government bureaucracy use cases that have long since been divorced from true trustable security. They are instead a mountain of complexity, and the more complex a system, the less likely it is to be secure.
The thing about software is that you can audit it yourself - it's quite easy to read through the entire source code of a trivial but secure file encryption app and convince yourself that the algorithms match published and industry standard implementations, and that they match test vectors, and that it interoperates with another instance on another machine, or send the files off to someone else to double check. You cannot audit an IronKey yourself.
But yeah, sure, defense in depth is a thing, and if you use an IronKey and software encryption (with different passphrases!) then you probably end up with better security, or at least not worse :-)
Perhaps in an enterprise setting with physical controls and air gaps you might be able to have a device require a different admin PIN to change the passphrase, avoiding the latter scenario of data exfiltration, but then the device has to be explicitly designed with this in mind to avoid any other exfiltration channels for the true PIN and I don't think IronKeys claim to do this (I don't even know if they support such a split admin PIN). And besides, you probably have bigger problems if your air gapped computer is compromised anyway.
Really, IronKeys and their ilk cater to corporate and government bureaucracy use cases that have long since been divorced from true trustable security. They are instead a mountain of complexity, and the more complex a system, the less likely it is to be secure.
The thing about software is that you can audit it yourself - it's quite easy to read through the entire source code of a trivial but secure file encryption app and convince yourself that the algorithms match published and industry standard implementations, and that they match test vectors, and that it interoperates with another instance on another machine, or send the files off to someone else to double check. You cannot audit an IronKey yourself.
But yeah, sure, defense in depth is a thing, and if you use an IronKey and software encryption (with different passphrases!) then you probably end up with better security, or at least not worse :-)
More to the point, for the software solution, you have to trust the user to actually do the encryption and to use a strong passphrase.
This is an other good point. Not to mention secure key exchanges between users when necessary.
Then use both: put encrypted files on the encrypted drive.
"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."
And how much does it cost to convince 100,000 users to do this correctly, consistently? And to convince someone else that your personal certainty is worth a damn?
And how much does it cost to convince 100,000 users to do this correctly, consistently? And to convince someone else that your personal certainty is worth a damn?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps the buyer is not paying, she is only the purchaser. The purchase is actually paid for by taxpayers.
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.
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?
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?
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.
If I understand correctly this drive is supposed to detect tampering and erase the key if you attempt to open the encasing.
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).
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).
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.
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, which includes: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Making solutions that do not require carrying of sensitive material on portable devices is a much safer approach.
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.
Agreed, my own day job enforces this (much to the chagrin of users who assume they can)
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-ma...
[0]: https://www.cdw.com/product/kingston-datatraveler-4000-g2-ma...
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.
You are paying for the certificate, not for the software. Its not easy to become FIPS certified, there are costs.
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.
The amount of caveats in his question made me laugh. This guy certainly knows his audience.
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.
Great answer by Mike Ounsworth [0] . I learnt about something called FIPS-2 today :)
[0]https://security.stackexchange.com/users/61443/mike-ounswort...
[0]https://security.stackexchange.com/users/61443/mike-ounswort...
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?"
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.
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.
I think this is just a misunderstanding: the ad got targeted at the wrong person.
The difference with Ironkeys are you can remotely deactivate/erase them.
[deleted]
martin_a(1)
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.
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.