Nitrokey Storage - Bring your own storage

Nitrokey Generic
1

I have read (and seen pictures) that the nitrokey storage basically just has a fairly normal microSD in it, and considering that the limit on the storage you can buy is 64GB, could one just buy a nitrokey storage and for example swap the microSD card with a bigger one, and have a massive increase in space?

Additionally regarding pro/Storage (and possibly HSM) nitrokeys, if better smartcard chips become available (e.g. one supporting 25519 stuff) could it be possible to get that separately and just slot that in too, which not only saves cost but is also great for the environment.

2

Hey!

  1. Yes, that’s not a secret - Nitrokey Storage uses regular microSD card’s, however not all vendors are working hence it’s not accepting all of them. On top of that, we verify them before sending to users by running the initialization routine, which takes quite a time too. So by buying from the Nitrokey shop you can save your time, which could be wasted otherwise investigating compatibility issues. We do not support changing SD cards, as debugging problems with the unknown hardware takes too much time, and we can’t afford that if we want to develop new things.
  2. Same for the smart card, as long as firmware can handle it for it’s features. Or in the worst case you can just remove these from the firmware entirely, but you will end up with a dumb card reader. It certainly should be possible to handle e.g. PWS with a HSM card, but firmware is currently adjusted only to work with the OpenPGP smart card.
3

Thanks for the info.

It might be certainly cool if you find “v3” smartcard chips to use someday if it would be possible to get these standalone and throw into a v2 nitrokey and not waste a perfectly good nitrokey by just upgrading it.

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