One evening, while idly scrolling through a popular online marketplace, I happened upon an electronic lock with a fingerprint scanner. The description painted a picture of a nearly perfect device for a low price: biometric authentication, water resistance, and some sort of "unique" microchip. It sounded convincing, but a researcher's nature is to question marketing claims rather than take them at face value. So, naturally, the very next day, the lock was on my desk. From there, a familiar pattern emerged: one interesting device soon leads to a few more... 

My name is Denis Astafiev, and I am a lead hardware security researcher at Bastion—a Russian cybersecurity company. As part of my job, I regularly disassemble  various devices to see if the manufacturer's claims on the box hold up.

Today, we'll be examining three biometric locks to find the weak spots in their security.

Let me be clear: the goal of this article is not to subject a cheap Chinese lock to an exhaustive, lab-grade analysis at all costs. Instead, I want to use a simple, accessible example to show how a basic hardware security audit is typically conducted and why it's best to start with the simplest attacks, not the most complex ones.

Hey, Habr! Ivan Glinkin is here again, head of the hardware research group from the Bastion team. 

"A flash drive with a combination lock," "a flash drive with hardware encryption," "an encrypted USB drive," and finally, the proper term — "Cryptographic Module". An encrypted USB flash drive goes by many names, but the core concept remains the same.

The purpose of such a device is to protect sensitive information from unauthorized access at both the software and hardware levels through encryption, anti-tampering mechanisms, and various other safeguards. But are these secure USB drives really as reliable as they're made out to be, or is it all just smoke and mirrors? 

We decided to look past the marketing claims and conduct our own investigation, attempting to crack several of these devices using hardware reverse engineering. We attempted to extract data, identify the encryption algorithms used, physically open the drives, and read their memory chips.

The results were quite interesting. Read on for the details.