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churin
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Bitlocker vs Password Protection

Sat Mar 03, 2018 4:15 pm

My external USB SSD drive comes with an utility to set a password protection. What is the difference between such password protection and bitlocker protection? Is there any difference in protection level? Problem of bitlocker is that it takes long time to set up.
 
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Re: Bitlocker vs Password Protection

Sat Mar 03, 2018 4:24 pm

churin wrote:
My external USB SSD drive comes with an utility to set a password protection. What is the difference between such password protection and bitlocker protection? Is there any difference in protection level? Problem of bitlocker is that it takes long time to set up.

Protection supplied by the vendor of the device is entirely dependent on the quality of their firmware, and will vary across brands and models.
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Airmantharp
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Re: Bitlocker vs Password Protection

Sat Mar 03, 2018 4:59 pm

Whereas Bitlocker can be difficult to access outside of a Windows machine- and you'll want that key handy.

[I have a WD portable drive that must run its software to decrypt and mount its contents- works well enough for me to not care]
 
Yan
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Re: Bitlocker vs Password Protection

Sat Mar 03, 2018 6:46 pm

I'd consider Veracrypt instead, because it's open source and portable.
 
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Re: Bitlocker vs Password Protection

Sat Mar 03, 2018 7:25 pm

churin wrote:
What is the difference between such password protection and bitlocker protection? Is there any difference in protection level?


An answer requires information that we do not have. The vendor would need to publish details on their crypto implementation in order for us to assess it fairly. I would go with Bitlocker on any drive where such information is not available.

1. The quality of Bitlocker is known. It has a good algorithm and a good implementation (uses AES, is FIPS certified).

2. The compatibility of Bitlocker is excellent. It works seamlessly on any modern version of Windows, and it requires no special drivers or software that may be blocked by antivirus. It can work under Linux with Dislocker---not sure if the HD vendor's application will support Mac or Linux.

3. Bitlocker is extremely flexible, with multiple options for key protectors and recovery.

If you want to use Bitlocker, it will take time to encrypt the drive. However, you should be able to read and write from the drive during the encryption process.
 
churin
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Re: Bitlocker vs Password Protection

Sat Mar 03, 2018 7:40 pm

Airmantharp wrote:
Whereas Bitlocker can be difficult to access outside of a Windows machine- and you'll want that key handy.

[I have a WD portable drive that must run its software to decrypt and mount its contents- works well enough for me to not care]

Does the software for WD portable encrypt data when password protection is turned on? Mine is Samsung T3 2TB with 1TB data in it but setting up password protection is very quick. Whereas, turning on Bitlocker for this drive takes many hours to complete. Thus, I thought the password protection scheme does not involve encrypting data.
Could anyone shed light on the above?
 
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Re: Bitlocker vs Password Protection

Sat Mar 03, 2018 11:20 pm

If there's no documentation available from the vendor, then it's going to be difficult to figure out exactly what's going on in there. It's almost certainly not encrypting the whole drive like bitlocker does, so either there's no encryption, or it's a kind of encryption weak enough to be done in real time. My guess would be on the former, but there's no way to know with the information available.
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churin
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Re: Bitlocker vs Password Protection

Sun Mar 04, 2018 12:34 pm

Redocbew wrote:
If there's no documentation available from the vendor, then it's going to be difficult to figure out exactly what's going on in there. It's almost certainly not encrypting the whole drive like bitlocker does, so either there's no encryption, or it's a kind of encryption weak enough to be done in real time. My guess would be on the former, but there's no way to know with the information available.

Thanks for the information. Bitlocker appears a lot more secure, but I just have to limit data in the mobile drive if I want to use Bitlocker.
 
Airmantharp
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Re: Bitlocker vs Password Protection

Thu Mar 08, 2018 8:51 am

I'm not sure how it does it; I believe that the data partition is encrypted.

There is a difference in perspective here, though- the WD drive came empty, so there is no real setup time, whereas implementing Bitlocker on a populated drive would rightly take time.
 
churin
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Re: Bitlocker vs Password Protection

Fri Mar 09, 2018 7:44 am

Airmantharp wrote:
I'm not sure how it does it; I believe that the data partition is encrypted.

There is a difference in perspective here, though- the WD drive came empty, so there is no real setup time, whereas implementing Bitlocker on a populated drive would rightly take time.

As I already stated in one of my previous posts, I first saved about 1TB data in 2TB SSD(Samsung T3) and enabled the password protection. So enabling the password protection was done almost instantly, thus there seems to be no data encryption involved.
 
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Re: Bitlocker vs Password Protection

Fri Mar 23, 2018 6:23 pm

Don't many SSD's do encryption by default? It could be that your data is already encrypted, but unless and until you set a password, the drive's controller just decrypts it on the fly without credentials.

edit: I could be wrong though!
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