Encryption Of Data Encryption

USB drives constantly go missing.

Laptops and Notebook computers are often lost

And easily stolen by thieves.

And, while far less likely to go missing,

Unauthorised persons may gain access desktop Computers,

Along with Servers, which may contain vast troves

Of sensitive company information and customer data.

Additionally, the data they still possess when being disposed of

Can potentially be recovered if hard drives are not properly wiped.

One effective safe-guard against data theft is through the implementation of data encryption.

And one data encryption product currently available for Windows users, is BitLocker™

BitLocker™ Drive Encryption is a proprietary cryptography tool designed by Microsoft to provide enhanced data protection through

The encryption of entire disk drives. This includes the Operating System, user files, system files, swap files and hibernation files.

BitLocker provides encryption support for portable hard drives and flash drives aptly named BitLocker-to-Go. The feature requires a user to enter a password upon inserting the drive into a machine in order to gain access to the contents

BitLocker uses Advanced Encryption Standard 128 or 256 bit-key encryption. This level of encryption prompted at least one US Government Agency (the FBI) to approach Microsoft’s Peter Biddle, head of the engineering team that developed BitLocker, and unofficially request a back-door. Unofficially, Peter Biddle declined the request. Without a backdoor, or password knowledge, a brute force cracking attempt would likely take a few Trillions of years.

And it is worth mentioning that the Department of Defense has given this standard of encryption …

… Its seal of approval, because In the event that someone does manage to gain p...

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...able. If NTFS is employed users will receive a prompt to format the drive when attempting to access content.

Users will find that there are some reductions in performance and should generally expect a computer performance drop of at least single digit percentages.

BitLocker was built as protection for offline attacks and does not encrypt or decrypt data at the point of reading or writing, it will only encrypt whole drives as requested by the system. So as per usual, well maintained firewalls and quality anti-virus software are still essential safety components.

The software is proprietary and thus the source code is not available for public review, as such, consumers have no way to guarantee that there are no backdoors for government agencies or other malicious content regardless of what Microsoft may claim.

And that is BitLocker Drive Encryption in a nutshell.