I've been required to use similar products due to government regulations. Personally I never trusted them, and I would have loved to take 15 minutes poking around in them, but it was the government who mandated their use for their data so ultimately it was out of my hands.

We used these: https://apricorn.com/aegis-padlock-usb3

They work well in high security environments because you can allowlist the vendor and product id of only these hard drives, and you don't have to set up procedures where people HAVE to encrypt their drives before use.

So cost-wise it makes sense.

But for personal use? BitLocker / VeraCrypt all the way.

The overwhelming majority of people who use USB sticks for things are likely aware of security and the concept of encryption. But the idea of being able to use “free software cryptography on top” may as well be a trip to Mars.

>The correct solution is to use free software cryptography on top of these things.

If implemented correctly, "hardware" encryption can be more secure than "free software cryptography". The most obvious benefit is protection against brute-attacks, which you can't meaningfully implement with software. Not to mention added protection of biometric authentication as a second factor, compared to typing a password into a possibly untrusted machine.

A good reason you have to use these sticks is stand-alone devices.

For example, you need to print something; take some data from an oscilloscope or other instrument.

Your alternatives are to connect those devices to your network or some devices run Windows you can alt-tab out of and install your own software. Given risks and complexity of those, a hardware encrypted USB stick is the least bad.

You don't necessarily want free software and traditional cryptography for such use cases.

The traditional free software approach to cryptography is "derive the key from a passphrase; require the user to make the passphrase strong; if the passphrase is weak, put the onus on the user."

This works well for HNers, but is terrible for normies. What normal users want is a locked down chip (potentially running open source firmware!), which securely stores something like an AES key protected by a 6-digit pin, which gets erased after 10 unsuccessful attempts and cannot be cloned. This is how TPMs, Apple's secure enclaves and bank and SIM cards work. This kind of design did more to bring full-disk encryption to end users than any free software ever did.

These kinds of product are great for disaster recovery. E.g. your day to day use is software encrypted with a key bound to a TPM and stored in a central crypto store that verifies devices state before giving it out etc etc but then what do you do when all that shit breaks? Having the root key material on a hardware encrypted device on a safe is a great way to be able to restore from failures.

We have to use the ones that cost 8x more than regular ones and are certified by something that our industry approves.

There's a guy with some Bitcoin that knows about a model, I'd trust that one.

The ironkey at least has reasonable independent evaluations.

Software is insecure in many scenarios because endpoint security is abysmal. Of course, a USB stick with fingerprint reader cannot be secure but there is no way around hardware-based cryptography with independent key entry if you need real security. Then again, this won't help you if the secrets are transferred to the insecure endpoint anyway.

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