What is the benefit of having FIPS hardware-level encryption on a USB stick?
security.stackexchange.com
security.stackexchange.com
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.
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.
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...
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 :)
Wait until you find out the cost of producing most non-alcoholic beverages...
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.
Or is that fine because a business can't starve (even though its owners might?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The other economist replies "Nonsense, if there was then someone would have already picked it up by now."
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.
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.
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...
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.
What entry level turntable and speakers would you buy for listening to vinyl in a standard living room and why?
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.
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.
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 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.
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
Just because someone believes a con job doesn't make it less of a con job.
[1] https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2015/01/29/ex...
(links to paper)
Motor function is objectively measurable. "I like the sound of this" is not.
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).
The going price/capacity target for prosumer scale (>6TB) is $15/TB.
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
There's no excuse.
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.
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.
And fwiw, HDD go up to 18 TB nowadays.
SSDs also go way up in size, but prices spike after you hit a corner.
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...)
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.)
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...
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”.
Now I want to see a teardown of this USB stick
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)
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".
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
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. :))
I'm sure some of my own comments could also be misconstrued as 'fake comments' applying to virtually any submission!
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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).
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.
* Vials of fluoroantimonic acid affixed to the device with slabs of C4 and high voltage tripwires?
Have you considered contacting NIST to get certified? You could get in on the action.
In my experience with the government, a waiver is probably possible though. But none of our customers were demanding FIPS certification.
That's just off the top of my head.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Interestingly, you can slap just about anything you want in a bus without a second thought.
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.
"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 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 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 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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
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?
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.
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.
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?
If I understand correctly this drive is supposed to detect tampering and erase the key if you attempt to open the encasing.
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).
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.
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.
Making solutions that do not require carrying of sensitive material on portable devices is a much safer approach.
[0]: https://www.cdw.com/product/kingston-datatraveler-4000-g2-ma...
You are paying for the certificate, not for the software. Its not easy to become FIPS certified, there are costs.
[0]https://security.stackexchange.com/users/61443/mike-ounswort...
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.