BitLocker in Win7

Posted By: Adam Bomb | Jan 12th @ 12:01 AM | 24,827 Views | 3 Comments

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I recently had an opportunity to bring Shalu Gupta in to the studio to tell us what's new in BitLocker for Windows 7. Shalu is a Program Manager in Windows Security, and spends some time in this video showing us how BitLocker can be used to encrypt data on removable media like USB drives.
This is a feature that is easily enabled by policy and ensures that any sensitive data you have floating around on various storage devices is protected from unwanted access.

Tags: BitLocker, Top 10, Windows 7

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Swiatecki

Hi Adam and Shalu

Sounds great with the encryption of USB-drives, but i came to think about:

How will a USB-drive act when plugged into a XP, Vista, OSX or even Linux machine?

Best Regards

Nicholas Swiatecki Smiley

AdamBomb

In reply to Swiatecki

#Jan 12th @ 7:55 AM

hey Nicholas,
**correcting previous, incorrect response**

I talked with a couple guys in the product team that worked on this feature, and they set me straight on a couple things.
We are essentially shipping a BitLocker encrypted USB drive with a user-mode installable file system that allows earlier versions of Windows to read it, even if the user of a downlevel OS isn’t an administrator.
OSX and Linux are not supported, but theoretically, someone could write an app that would allow users with the correct creds to unlock a BitLocker volume on those OSs.

-a

vcsjones

In reply to AdamBomb

#Jan 12th @ 7:58 AM

Why not just use EFS on your USB drive? That technology has been around for ages and just recently got the AES-256 treatment. The only difference I can tell is that EFS uses a certificate and BitLocker stores the key in TPM...