Was it probably a IronKey? They had a Homeland Security grant, I've used one then. To me software had some advantages. Easy backup of the encrypted data without a dependency to the hardware. IIRC this was somehow solved on the IronKey. Not a black box for the user which have to trust. My main problem with a software solution for me is the entry of the password which I have to do on a probably compromised computer.

The original IronKey (later sold to Kingston) seems to have be cracked. A team / company called Unciphered managed to break a IronKey in a attempt to offer such a decryption to Stefan Thomas who had 7002 bitcoin on this key. This was then worth then 235 million dollar (now >500 million), which is of course a VERY strong motivation. [1]

The Lenovo case of course seems not to be bad implemented security but no security at all, especially if they advertise with encryption, which I found on a Asian Lenovo website where still there are still some specs of the key [2]. A good method if you want to damage your reputation.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/unciphered-ironkey-password-crac...

[2] https://tk.lenovo.com.cn/product/1003497.html

Ironically the DOJ isn’t great at this. Infamously they just gave California an encrypted thumb drive with 20,000 names of, allegedly, non-citizens registered to vote.

The password was included on a sticky note in the package.

That's just the thing; these devices aren't meant to be -good-, they're meant to check boxes.

You can probably implement your own these days. I would use a model to generate a requirement document, then human review, then generate an implementation plan, then human review, then take it to build. Have a different model to a code review and testing. End with human code review and testing.

You could make your own BitLocker conforming to your requirements without relying on or trusting any cloud or corporate entity.

MS stores your Bitlocker keys on Microsoft servers now if you ever login with a OneDrive account, at least they were.

And MS has handed those keys over to law enforcement before.

Most "normies" I know think that open source cryptography is less secure because it's "open" (if they even know open source cryptography is a thing at all). No amount of trying to explain to them how more eyes on the source code generally equals safer encryption will sway most of them in the slightest.

“Correctly” is a big caveat. Almost no HW implementation is auditable in any way.

My baseline assumption is that even the good commercial products are only secure from a non-determined attacker, not TLAs. Anything safe from TLAs is what’s being sold only to them.

you're not gonna brute force an AES256 key

if you have a bad password that's a user issue

> If implemented correctly, "hardware" encryption can be more secure than "free software cryptography".

Well you can use open-source / free software cryptography to encrypt and decrypt using a secret key which you do not need to remember and which is safely stored behind a secure element.

And there are quite a few people doing just that.

It's immensely more secure than trusting Lenovo or Microsoft or whatever company.

And you can have your secret on the secure element protected by biometric auth too (some do offer just that).

And there are devices like that with a tiny attack surface that accept biometric (like your fingerprint) to unlock the secret.

To get the best of both world you trust the HSM with one thing: the secret, and that's it. And you use open-source software and protocols (like GPG and OpenSSH) with that secret.