This week there were widespread reports that hardware-encrypted USB thumb drives from SanDisk, Kingston and Verbatim suffer a serious security design flaw, allowing them to be unlocked without knowing a user’s password.
Security guru Bruce Schneier posted an article about this, and dicussed in particular how the FIPS 140-2 Level 2 security validation that the SanDisk device had received from NIST would allow such a fatal security flaw.
Today there are been discussion that the affected device has undergone Common Criteria EAL2 certification. Common Criteria is thought to ensure a higher level of security than the FIPS 140-2 Level 2 validation.
However, blog posters were quick to point out that there is no government approved “protection profile” for hardware encrypted USB removable storage devices (though I am told that NSA is working on developing one). This means that the vendor, in this case SanDisk, is simply verifying that the device works as THEY specify, and is not actually validating their product against industry standard security requirements.
Effectively the security target document excludes the password authentication and trusted communication path between host PC and the device. This means that even though the product has “Common Criteria EAL2″ certification, the critically vulnerable component, password authentication, was not in fact part of that certification.
All this commotion is bringing to light that security certifications are important, but do not by themselves make a product secure. Buyers, and vendors themselves, need to understand exactly what components have been validated, and whether they are being validated against a standard set of security requirements, or are simply being “validated” to do what the vendor says they do, even if that implies security vulnerabilities.
Following the admonition of Kingston more supposedly secure drives are found to be vulnerable. Details have emerged of the far too simple hack that makes quick work defeating certain encryption programs. The drives themselves remain secure except the common software that opens them up seems to use basically the same "password correct" command to the drive to start serve up the protected contents. Using and in-line sniffer the universal password was discovered, and could easily be inserted into the data stream and start unraveling all those super secret files, like using a digital bump-key. Many of these affected drives have been granted FIPS 140-2 government security standards certification, whoops. This is a very easy hack, and by "easy" we mean that you'd need to have a degree in electronics and a penchant for reading binary data with a few months to spare to whip up a program. You could always convert to TrueCrypt or some other software based encryption tool. If not, you should check to see if your drive is affected, and whether or not you can return it or patch it. Verbatim and SanDisk both have released software patches that should fix the issue. Since this vulnerability seems to have been incorporated into several manufacturers, more are likely to come to light in the next few weeks. You'd be wise to keep an eye on the feeds to make sure your private drive doesn't show up on the list. 
