You are required to have a drive with at least two partitions as well as a special chip known as Trusted Platform Module (TPM). In addition to running one of the support flavors of the Windows OS, there are some other system requirements which need to be fulfilled in order to run BitLocker. It is easy to use and can encrypt your hard drive and protect against malware attacking your system’s firmware or attempting to make other unauthorized changes without a noticeable slowdown.
The Pro, Enterprise, and Education editions of Windows 10 installed on their computer.
The Pro and Enterprise editions of Windows 8 and 8.1.The Ultimate and Enterprise editions of Windows Vista and Windows 7.
What is BitLocker?īitLocker is a proprietary encryption program offered by Microsoft on some of its versions of the Windows operating system. There are many applications that provide encryption for data resident on a storage device or being transmitted across a network. Without the key or password, the drive and its data are inaccessible. Currently, the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm is most often used with 128, 192 or 256-bit keys.Īn encrypted hard drive offers the user protection for their data in the event that the hard drive is stolen or accessed by unauthorized users. There are a number of encryption algorithms in use that employ either symmetric or asymmetric keys to encode and decode the data. Plain-text data is encoded during encryption and can only be decrypted with a key. It is often employed to safeguard sensitive information such as credit card and bank account numbers. Other drive encryption programs have similar issues.Encryption is the process of algorithmically transforming information making it unreadable to unauthorized individuals. If a forensics analyst or thief has physical access to a running system, it is possible to take advantage of the fact that the contents are in the computer's memory. Like most similar digital forensics analysis software, Passware Kit Forensic requires access to a physical memory image file of the target computer before it can extract all the encryption keys for a BitLocker disk. UpdateĪs pointed out in the comments, this isn't exactly a "crack" for BitLocker. It is meant to prevent a thief or thieves from using another operating system or hacking tool to get around file and system protections provided by Windows in order to view files stored on the drive. By default, it uses the AES encryption algorithm in CBC mode with a 128 bit-key, combined with the Elephant diffuser for additional disk encryption security not provided by AES. It is designed to protect data by providing encryption for entire volumes.
AdvertisementīitLocker Drive Encryption is a full disk encryption feature available in the Ultimate and Enterprise editions of Windows Vista and Windows 7, as well as the Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 operating systems.
There's also a portable version of the software that runs from a USB drive and finds encrypted files, plus recovers files and website passwords without making any changes to the target computer.
It is a complete encrypted evidence discovery solution that reports all password-protected items on a computer and gains access to these items using the fastest decryption and password recovery algorithms at its disposal. Passware Kit Forensic is a tool that can recover passwords from various file types, decrypt Microsoft Word and Excel files up to version 2003, and reset passwords for local and domain Windows administrators.
Add to that the fact that previous versions of this software have been pirated (version 9.0 was released earlier this year), and it's only a matter of time before even the price point doesn't matter. That may be, but since this is a commercially available product, anyone with $795 can now circumvent the encryption. Passware claims that full disk encryption was a major problem for investigators and that its tool helps police, law enforcement, and private investigators bypass BitLocker encryption for seized computers. As a result, Passware has crowned itself the creator of the first commercially available software to crack BitLocker Drive Encryption. It scans a physical memory image file of the target computer and extracts all the encryption keys for a given BitLocker disk. Passware Kit Forensic version 9.5 can recover encryption keys for hard drives protected with BitLocker in just a few minutes. Passware, a software firm that provides password recovery, decryption, and evidence discovery software for computer forensics, has updated its flagship application this week to support breaking Microsoft's BitLocker hard drive encryption.