nitrokey-storage-firmware
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Nitrokey
Sudden data loss on EV
User reports sudden data loss on Windows 10 on Encrypted Volume. From the description it appears that the AES key was changed. Asking for further details.
Should be fixed in v0.55 release. Leaving open for monitoring. To be closed on the next release.
Unfortunately this problem has reproduced again, on a different OS. Quote from the user's report below:
This most serious recent problem, which caused erasing both data and TOTPs, happened on Dell Precision 7560 with Fedora 34 and following versions of libnitrokey, nitrokey-app and nitrokey storage firmware:
- libnitrokey: 3.5-5.fc34
- nitrokey-app: 1.4.2-2.fc34
- firmware: 0.55
First warning mentioned that (all of a sudden!) encryption keys are missing and they need to be generated (even though I’ve been using this disk with encrypted volume and TOTPs for several months already). Thinking that perhaps there was some update to Nitrokey-App (as I do frequent updates to all packages), I followed these instructions. Unfortunately, this still did not allow me to unlock and mount the encrypted volume, and I received another warning, this time it said “Encrypted volume is not secure, Select ‘Initialize storage with random data’.”. Again, not being able to encrypt and mount the volume I use daily in my work, I clicked ‘yes’, assuming there was some update to Nitrokey-App. However, upon completion of this, all data and TOTPs got erased; I had to create a (EXT4) partition all over again.
I expect some data access race condition is still occurring, which was missed during the last time the code was reviewed. This should be found and removed, or the implementation restructured. Having a backup configuration page should help as well. Firmware side it seems to occur only in a certain usage pattern, or under a heavy load. I do not see how hardware could trigger this behavior (which basically is clearing the user configuration pages).
This was reported recently on the support forum with current firmware, but the cause seem to be in the configuration being lost or overwritten. In general the frequency of the data lost look a lot smaller than it used to be before the latest release.