Hardware-based encryption busted on USB Flash Drives

[GomJabbar]

Saw this link posted on another forum.

A word of warning to those of you who rely on hardware-based encrypted USB flash drives. Security firm SySS has reportedly cracked the AES 256-bit hardware-based encryption used on flash drives manufactured by Kingston, SanDisk and Verbatim.

The crack relies on a weakness so astoundingly bone-headed that it’s almost hard to believe....

http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=6655&tag=nl.e589

[ThinkRob]

cracked the AES 256-bit hardware-based encryption

That's a little misleading. It's not like they broke AES-256, or even took advantage of any property of the cipher in their attack. The actual cipher held up just fine -- the problem was the rest of the code surrounding it that was so moronically-designed that it was trivial to break.