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.

Apache Kafka is a distributed event-streaming platform designed to handle real-time data feeds. It allows applications to publish, process, and subscribe to streams of data in a highly scalable, fault-tolerant manner.

Search your own data like in google search engine.

Here is a bit refreshed translation of my 2015 blog post. The post shows how to organize a personal academic library of unlimited size for free. This is a funny case of a self written manual which I came back to multiple times myself and many many more times referred my friends to it, even non-Russian speakers who had to use Google Translator and infer the rest from screenshots. Finally, I decided to translate it adding some basic information on how to use Zotero with rmarkdown.

A brief (and hopefully unnecessary for you) intro of bibliographic managers

Bibliographic manager is a life saver in everyday academic life. I suffer almost physical pain just thinking about colleagues who for some reason never started using one — all those excel spreadsheets with favorite citations, messy folders with PDFs, constant hours lost for the joy-killing task of manual reference list formatting. Once you start using a reference manager this all becomes a happily forgotten nightmare.