It seems like the benefits are having the device lock/wipe itself after a set amount of attempts in case of a brute force attack and not having to run software to decrypt the drive on the device you plug it into.

I included a picture of the IronKey Keypad 200 but that's just because it's the first result that came up when I was looking for an example. There seem to be a few other manufacturers and models out there and they probably have different features.

I am curious what do you think of them? Do you think they are useful? Do you find it more a novelty?


It was an ExplainingComputers video titled Very Useful Small Computing Things that made me think of them.

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[–] [S] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

That's why I said to combine it with something else. Jenny's number might be in a dictionary that is used in a brute force attack but hopefully something like your middle school locker combination isn't. It's still 7 extra bits of entropy.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Password Entropy = length * log2(possible_chars). So this would actually add 7*log2(10) => 23 bits of entropy, assuming the attacker knew that this section was numeric, or ~45 bits if they didn't.

    For anyone curious: Current best practice is a minimum of 100 bits, or 16 characters assuming only letters, numbers, and special characters. The recommended minimum bits increases every year with computing power.

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