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.

Bitlocker password recovery tool