Disclaimer: None of the products mentioned in this post are sponsored. These are purely my personal favorites based on usability, performance, and design. None of these products were sent to me for free or at discounted prices.
So, this post will be a little different. Today, I will talk about some products that I bought in 2024 that I really liked using. As of Jan 4, 2025, I use all of these daily.
YubiKey Bio
Thanks to Rami Kayyali and James Garrad at the BlackHat MEA 2024 YubiKey stand for suggesting this
I'm a bit late to the party with this one, but I recently got a YubiKey Bio FIDO2 passkey. It works great! I've used it to decrypt my emails, unlock my laptop, unlock my password manager (in combination with a master password), use it for 2FA instead of TOTPs (Time-based One-Time Passwords), and a ton more. It's well made, comes in USB-C and USB-A, is compact, and, of course, comes with biometric authentication that supports up to five fingerprints, which I really like because I'm afraid of theft.
DockCase 10 in 1 Explorer Edition Smart Hub
This is a very cool USB hub. It has a little screen that displays info like charging power, Ethernet status, display quality and FPS, and USB status and speed. The Explorer Edition comes with transparent glass that shows the internals, which I really like. It's quite durable and does not have any cracks or scratches, even after five months of use. It's very fast with one USB-A port that runs at 10 GBPS and one USB-C port that runs at 10 GBPS. It has both an HDMI and DisplayPort input; both run at 8K30Hz and 4K120Hz, an ethernet port that runs at 1000 MBPS, both an SD and Micro SD port, and it also has two 480 MBPS USB-A ports for your mouse and keyboard and a 100W PD-only USB-C port.
SlimQ 330W charger
I use an MSI GE78HX for security work. It's a very large gaming laptop and has terrible battery life, which is understandable since it has a 4090 and a Core i9-13980HX, but this can be very annoying since the stock charger is literally the size of a brick. But I recently bought a smaller charger by a brand called SlimQ. It's still 330W like the stock charger, but it's more than half the size and about as big as a stock Mac charger.
GL.inet Slate AX
Recently I was looking for a nice portable router that I could use in hotels and at work, and I stumbled upon GL.inet I had some very specific requirements for my router. I wanted it to have an open-source firmware preloaded on it or official support for OpenWRT, and I wanted VPN support. I had quite a bit of trouble finding something that meets these requirements, but this is what I ended up with: It has built-in support for Mullvad VPN (I always use a VPN for privacy, both at home and outside; note: VPNs ARE ALMOST USELESS AGAINST INTERCEPTION BECAUSE 99.99% OF WEBSITES USE HTTPS; THEY ARE ONLY GOOD TO PREVENT ATTACKERS FROM KNOWING THE URLS YOU VISIT AND TO HIDE YOUR IP FROM WEBSITES OR IF YOU ARE DOING SOME SPECIFIC TASKS), which is my personal choice, and goes up to 550 Mbps for WireGuard®.
It comes with a repeater mode and up to 500 GB of network storage (SMB/WebDAV) via SD card. It's a great all-around router, but it might feel a bit pricey if you don’t use a VPN or need the (relatively) high-power CPU (IPQ6000 Quad-core, @1.2 GHz). Using a VPN at the router level is nice because you can force all devices to go under the VPN without worrying about any misconfig on your computer's end that makes some services go without a VPN. The router also supports Oblivious DNS over HTTPS (ODoH), which is very, very nice. In ODoH, the queries are encrypted and proxied through an intermediary. This ensures that the DNS resolver doesn’t know who made the query, and the intermediary doesn’t know what the query is.
GL.inet Flint 2
After buying the Slate AX, I was still looking for a nice home router with the same requirements, so I went with the same brand; the GL.inet Flint 2 is one of my favorite routers. WireGuard® goes up to 900 Mbps. It has multi-WAN support network storage (SMB/WebDAV) via USB-A 3.0 (maximum 5V/2A output). It's very powerful, and it also has an amazing range and single-handedly covers my 3229.18-square-foot home without issue. Just like the Slate AX, it supports ODoH and allows you to force all devices to use the VPN
Sparrows Lockpick sets
I absolutely love lockpicks and find myself buying more almost every month. One of my favorite brands is Sparrows Lock Picks. Their lockpicks are exceptionally well-made, lightweight, and feature some of the coolest and most innovative designs I've seen on the market—all at very reasonable prices. Plus, they include some of the coolest stickers I’ve ever received from a brand, and they send them for free!
Tamper Stickers
This one is for the ultra-paranoid, like me, but high-quality tamper stickers are great. Physical attacks are rare but extremely dangerous. One of the best ways to stop them is full disk encryption, but that does not help if someone opens up your laptop and sticks a keylogger in there. Tamper stickers solve this; just put a couple on the screen and body of your laptop, and you are fine. It's also useful to put over USB ports when going to hacking conferences or any other high-risk areas for hotplugs. I've also used them to protect my Christmas presents from snoopers (AKA my mom)
