“I appreciate concerns with using Chinese technology, but we’re very confident that even though we’re using these chips, our products cannot be hacked, even by Initio or Hualan,” iStorage's CEO John Michael says. (Michael also noted that some of iStorage products use a chip sold by Taiwanese firm Phison instead of Hualan or Initio, but didn't specify which products.)

Even if a bridge controller chip doesn't create a secret key and isn't intended to store it, however, it still has enough access to it to enable a backdoor, says Matthew Green, a cryptography-focused computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University.