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This leaves with a bit of concern about how reliable is storage encryption on consumer hardware at all.

As far as I know, recent Android devices and iPhones have full disk encryption by default, but they do protect the keys against random bit-flipping?

Also, I guess that authentication devices (like YubiKey) are not safe and easy to use at the same time, because the private key inside can be damaged/modified by a cosmic ray, and it's not possible (by design) to make duplicates. So, it's necessary to have multiple of them to compensate, lowering their practicality in the end.

Edit: from the software side, I understand that there are techniques to ensure some level of data safety (checksumming, redudancy, etc), but it thought it was OK to have some random bit-flipping on hard disks (where I found it more frequently), since it could be corrected from software. Now I realize that if the encryption key is randomly changed on RAM, the data can or becomes permanently irrecoverable.



Disk is unreliable anyways, so they already have to use software error correction. I suspect that protects against these kind of errors.




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