Nifty. I couldn’t see a practical use for myself but, it’s cool none the less.
Very useful for getting any sort of private data through an airport that does not respect privacy. For example any US airport…
No it isn’t. It will be treated like any other drive where encryption is nothing new. In fact, to look for a text file and then make something accessible means it is likely much easier to detect that something is off about it than regular encryption that just looks like random data. Whether it tries to hide it’s true storage capacity or boots its own internal OS to present storage, people often think they’re being clever when really they’re just making themselves stand out.
Do you think TSA/CBP is going to check the flash data lines to see if the MCU is scanning the flash internally?
This isn’t a standard USB flash controller… You would need to break the casing and physically probe it to figure out that something was off as far as I can tell. It’s not like the MCU broadcasts that it is scanning to the USB port.
You would have to be hitting the stick pretty hard, not just a normal file scan to notice the timing being slightly too long in a small portion of the scans. The bigger problem would be that the flash drive would be brand-recognizable if it ends up being mass produced that they might auto-confiscate it, and of course the default file that it searches for being known.
If I got it right, you could easily detect this drive by just creating password.txt. as the article says it creation is intercepted and skipped. Hence if there is no password.txt afterwards, you know what you’re dealing with. Still, you have to know this AND care.
It looks for a string “password:xyz” bring written to any file, where xyz is the password. If you get the password wrong it’ll just write the file normally
Ah okay, so then I retract my statement and better my reading-skills 😁
You are yapping your ass off. This is a hardware mod, not a software package. Its literally using a custom storage controller chip that only physically unlocks the connection to the secret storage once it detects a certain key file on the decoy storage. They would have to xray the drive individually at close range with high resolution and know a lot about electronics to even come close to figuring out that something is different. There is no way to detect a fake USB HID so unless they open it they wont be noticing shit.
You’re completely confusing device classes and how forensic acquisition works.
First, it’s a USB Mass Storage device, not a USB HID (Human Interface Device). Mass Storage operates via SCSI block commands wrapped in USB packets.
Second, even if the custom firmware successfully fakes the LBA table to report 8 GB, it fails at the protocol level. Forensic tools don’t just read files—they issue low-level SCSI INQUIRY and MODE SENSE commands. Commercial flash controllers (Phison, Silicon Motion) have hardcoded ASIC signatures and proprietary descriptors. A generic CH569 MCU running C code trying to fake these descriptors or pass off software-bridged microSD reads introduces packet latency, timing jitter, and missing SCSI pages that log protocol anomalies during raw acquisition.
Finally, software doesn’t matter if they look at the hardware. Modern 3D CT/X-ray baggage scanners visually isolate silicon footprints instantly without opening the casing. A standard commercial drive is a single integrated ASIC on NAND. A board with a generic CH569 MCU, voltage regulators, UART test points, and a physical microSD socket stands out.
You are so close to being right, and yet, so far away.
You misunderstood what is seen or how it works.
When the drive is checked, you can see files and whatever on what appears to be an 8GB flash drive.
You have to add the specifically worded txt file into that drive before the hidden drive shows up.
If he had only spent an extra $0.50 and added a Microchip 608c (https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/atecc608c) to the design, then you wouldn’t have to deal with cleartext passwords in files. Instead, you could have elliptic-curve, asymmetric public-key encryption.
So you make a competitor then and I’ll buy it
Why not just use veracrypt?
That’s what I would go with if I was inclined. Create a volume the size of the drive and add a hidden volume with a different password within like we’ve been doing for years (decades at this point maybe almost).
I would upload encrypt file somewhere and download it when needed. If you’re worried someone will actually access your USB stick looking for encrypted data, why carry it at all? It’s cool if you want to pretend you’re a spy or something but it’s not very practical.
That’s assuming that wherever you are going to or coming from has an internet connection. It’s likely that there will be a connection, but it’s still not a guarantee. And if there is a connection, the size of the files you’re carrying may make using that connection impractical.
I guess you might just want to carry all your passwords in there, but then generally the password file itself is encrypted so I don’t see the point.
that’s like saying “password managers require a password so I don’t see the point”
That is pretty much what I said yeah
How is this better than a Veracrypt hidden partition on a standard thumb drive?
IIRC Veracrypt is easier to detect since it does some trickery with the filesystem and software while this has 2 memory chips and one is phisically disconnected then it scan for a string that looks like “password:1234” inside a file called “password.txt” at every write and if the password is correct it will connect the chip again, so it’s virtually undetectable unless you crack open the USB stick and know what you are looking at (which is an highly unrealistic scenario for an airport unless you are in a country that’s in a war period)
Not true. Veracrypt’s hidden file system is random data on a preexisting partition that uses no software. You can only detect it if you install Veracrypt and guess the password.
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If pointless noise on forums is one of the biggest downsides of LLMs, isn’t your whole spamming thorn game self defeating?
I’ll stick to a Veracrypt full disk encryption with a hidden partition. All the benefits of a duress password, none of the data deletion that gets you V&
PSA: Veracrypt recommends against using hidden volumes on USB flash drives (source)
They don’t recommend against it… It’s a detailed guideline on doing it successfully.
A VeraCrypt volume resides on a device/filesystem that utilizes a wear-leveling mechanism (e.g. a flash-memory SSD or USB flash drive). A copy of (a fragment of) the VeraCrypt volume may remain on the device. Therefore, do not store hidden volumes on such devices/filesystems.
I understand that page is a bit dense, so I’m quoting the relevant text from the above source.
They make a very poor job of highlighting something so important in a dense page detailing how to do what they recommend you don’t.
