I’m still busy recovering from the excellent Source Boston conference and I will post a recap soon but I wanted to get this out there.
Last week I wrote about RFID enabled external hard drives that supposedly offered secure encryption of your data that turned out to be simple XOR. Well now USB thumb drives with integrated fingerprint readers have been found to be just as much Snake Oil. Hiese Security has reviewed several of the devices and have found it very easy to bypass the security of all of them. Companies that make crap like this should be found criminally responsible for fruad.
People see biometrics and automatically think they are secure, same thing when they see the word ‘encryption’. Your fingerprint is not a secret, you leave thousands of copies lying around everyday. In addition once the attacker has physical access to the device then your security will be compromised, fingerprint or not.
Oh, and I hope everyone had fun on Pi Day yesterday.
About Space Rogue
With over two decades of experience, Space Rogue (Cris Thomas) has testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and has been interviewed by Wired, CNBC and even MTV. He created the wildly popular websites the Whacked Mac Archives and Cyber Squirrel 1. He produced the weekly podcast SpiderLabs Radio, and the critically acclaimed weekly news video program the Hacker News Network. His writing has appeared in Network Computing, New Statesman, The Hill, and the Christian Science Monitor. He has spoken at security conferences such as Def Con, Blackhat, and Shmoocon. Space Rogue currently works as the Global Lead of Policy and Special Initiatives for the legendary IBM X-Force.
More USB Snake Oil
I’m still busy recovering from the excellent Source Boston conference and I will post a recap soon but I wanted to get this out there.
Last week I wrote about RFID enabled external hard drives that supposedly offered secure encryption of your data that turned out to be simple XOR. Well now USB thumb drives with integrated fingerprint readers have been found to be just as much Snake Oil. Hiese Security has reviewed several of the devices and have found it very easy to bypass the security of all of them. Companies that make crap like this should be found criminally responsible for fruad.
People see biometrics and automatically think they are secure, same thing when they see the word ‘encryption’. Your fingerprint is not a secret, you leave thousands of copies lying around everyday. In addition once the attacker has physical access to the device then your security will be compromised, fingerprint or not.
Oh, and I hope everyone had fun on Pi Day yesterday.
About Space Rogue
With over two decades of experience, Space Rogue (Cris Thomas) has testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and has been interviewed by Wired, CNBC and even MTV. He created the wildly popular websites the Whacked Mac Archives and Cyber Squirrel 1. He produced the weekly podcast SpiderLabs Radio, and the critically acclaimed weekly news video program the Hacker News Network. His writing has appeared in Network Computing, New Statesman, The Hill, and the Christian Science Monitor. He has spoken at security conferences such as Def Con, Blackhat, and Shmoocon. Space Rogue currently works as the Global Lead of Policy and Special Initiatives for the legendary IBM X-Force.