"The USB stick, whose development was funded in part by the United States Department of Homeland Security, is FIPS-140-2 Level 3 certified, meaning it's tamper-resistant and its encryption is secure enough for use by military and intelligence agencies for classified information." Fascinating what lengths they went through, thanks for sharing.

Are you pointing out there's a difference between algos reducible to known hardness assumptions (let's say Schnorr not ecdsa for simplicity), and thus computationally hard at best, vs information theoretic security like a one time pad? If so, good point to raise, but i trust both of the much more than the hardware substrate which is, to my mind, the biggest weak spot to worry about, and where it's the most important to worry about CPOFs.

I agree. yeah I was wondering which way is the most reproducible yet secure ways of storing secrets.