Nobody was checking the drives that encrypt your laptop A drive ships with a label promising hardware encryption. You plug it in, set a password, and trust the chip inside to handle the rest. Millions of laptops and workstations run this way, on solid-state drives built to the TCG Opal2 standard. Milan Brož and three colleagues bought 38 of those drives and ran them through a test bench. Brož maintains cryptsetup, the tool that configures disk encryption on most Linux systems. The drives came from Samsung, Western Digital, Micron, Kioxia, and others, a mix of new stock and secondhand units pulled from laptops. The team treated each one as a black box and sent it only the commands the Opal2 documentation defines. Several drives failed on basic points. What the drives got wrong Two Lenovo…