this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2026
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No it isn't. It will be treated like any other drive where encryption is nothing new. In fact, to look for a text file and then make something accessible means it is likely much easier to detect that something is off about it than regular encryption that just looks like random data. Whether it tries to hide it's true storage capacity or boots its own internal OS to present storage, people often think they're being clever when really they're just making themselves stand out.
You are yapping your ass off. This is a hardware mod, not a software package. Its literally using a custom storage controller chip that only physically unlocks the connection to the secret storage once it detects a certain key file on the decoy storage. They would have to xray the drive individually at close range with high resolution and know a lot about electronics to even come close to figuring out that something is different. There is no way to detect a fake USB HID so unless they open it they wont be noticing shit.
Do you think TSA/CBP is going to check the flash data lines to see if the MCU is scanning the flash internally?
This isn't a standard USB flash controller... You would need to break the casing and physically probe it to figure out that something was off as far as I can tell. It's not like the MCU broadcasts that it is scanning to the USB port.
You would have to be hitting the stick pretty hard, not just a normal file scan to notice the timing being slightly too long in a small portion of the scans. The bigger problem would be that the flash drive would be brand-recognizable if it ends up being mass produced that they might auto-confiscate it, and of course the default file that it searches for being known.
If I got it right, you could easily detect this drive by just creating password.txt. as the article says it creation is intercepted and skipped. Hence if there is no password.txt afterwards, you know what you're dealing with. Still, you have to know this AND care.
It's only skipping if your password matches. Otherwise it'll just be a normal file.
It looks for a string "password:xyz" bring written to any file, where xyz is the password. If you get the password wrong it'll just write the file normally
How would it be detected? It seems like the password detection and decryption is happening at the hardware level, and they take steps to have it show up as nothing more than a standard drive. I'm not an expert on this stuff though.
Airport forensic team can't flag an encrypted drive it can't detect.
The article talks about this.