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USB Key Mode: The user must insert a USB device that contains a startup key into the computer to be able to boot the protected OS. Note that this mode requires that the BIOS on the protected machine supports the reading of USB devices in the pre-OS environment. BitLocker does not support smart cards for pre-boot authentication. [31]
Multiple keys: Whether an encrypted volume can have more than one active key. Passphrase strengthening: Whether key strengthening is used with plain text passwords to frustrate dictionary attacks, usually using PBKDF2 or Argon2. Hardware acceleration: Whether dedicated cryptographic accelerator expansion cards can be taken advantage of.
This key is itself encrypted in some way using a password or pass-phrase known (ideally) only to the user. Thereafter, in order to access the disk's data, the user must supply the password to make the key available to the software. This must be done sometime after each operating system start-up before the encrypted data can be used.
Screenshot of the Syskey utility on the Windows 8.1 operating system requesting the user to enter a password.. The SAM Lock Tool, better known as Syskey (the name of its executable file), is a discontinued component of Windows NT that encrypts the Security Account Manager (SAM) database using a 128-bit RC4 encryption key.
Since disk encryption generally uses the same key for encrypting the whole drive, all of the data can be decrypted when the system runs. However, some disk encryption solutions use multiple keys for encrypting different volumes. If an attacker gains access to the computer at run-time, the attacker has access to all files.
The symmetric encryption key is maintained independently from the computer's CPU, thus allowing the complete data store to be encrypted and removing computer memory as a potential attack vector. Hardware-FDE has two major components: the hardware encryptor and the data store. There are currently four varieties of hardware-FDE in common use:
Binding: Data is encrypted using the TPM bind key, a unique RSA key descended from a storage key. Computers that incorporate a TPM can create cryptographic keys and encrypt them so that they can only be decrypted by the TPM. This process, often called wrapping or binding a key, can help protect the key from disclosure.
The attacker having physical access to a computer can, for example, install a hardware or a software keylogger, a bus-mastering device capturing memory or install any other malicious hardware or software, allowing the attacker to capture unencrypted data (including encryption keys and passwords) or to decrypt encrypted data using captured ...