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BitLocker is a logical volume encryption system. (A volume spans part of a hard disk drive, the whole drive or more than one drive.) When enabled, TPM and BitLocker can ensure the integrity of the trusted boot path (e.g. BIOS and boot sector), in order to prevent most offline physical attacks and boot sector malware. [37]
Note that this does not imply that the encrypted disk can be used as the boot disk itself; refer to pre-boot authentication in the features comparison table. Partition: Whether individual disk partitions can be encrypted. File: Whether the encrypted container can be stored in a file (usually implemented as encrypted loop devices).
The encryption method should not waste disk space (i.e., the amount of storage used for encrypted data should not be significantly larger than the size of plaintext). The first property requires defining an adversary from whom the data is being kept confidential. The strongest adversaries studied in the field of disk encryption have these ...
FileVault uses the user's login password as the encryption pass phrase. It uses the XTS-AES mode of AES with 128 bit blocks and a 256 bit key to encrypt the disk, as recommended by NIST. [11] [12] Only unlock-enabled users can start or unlock the drive. Once unlocked, other users may also use the computer until it is shut down.
Some disk encryption software (e.g., TrueCrypt or BestCrypt) provide features that generally cannot be accomplished with disk hardware encryption: the ability to mount "container" files as encrypted logical disks with their own file system; and encrypted logical "inner" volumes which are secretly hidden within the free space of the more obvious ...
Also, Windows 7 Enterprise, Windows 7 Ultimate and Windows Server 2008 R2 provide USB drive encryption using BitLocker to Go. The Apple Computer Mac OS X operating system has provided software for disc data encryption since Mac OS X Panther was issued in 2003 (see also: Disk Utility). [citation needed] Additional software can be installed on an ...
With a software implementation, the bootstrapping code cannot be encrypted however. For example, BitLocker Drive Encryption leaves an unencrypted volume to boot from, while the volume containing the operating system is fully encrypted. With full disk encryption, the decision of which individual files to encrypt is not left up to users' discretion.
Even if the data is encrypted on the physical medium of the drive, the fact that the firmware is controlled by a malicious third-party means that it can be decrypted by that third-party. If data is encrypted by the operating system, and it is sent in a scrambled form to the drive, then it would not matter if the firmware is malicious or not.