I am new to bitlocker but I want to start using it. I set it up my c drive and now I think that my drive is secure however, I came across these two pages, Passware Kit Decrypts Hard Disks Encrypted with BitLocker or TrueCrypt and This $299 Tool Decrypts BitLocker, PGP, and TrueCrypt Disks What do I have to do to make these tools unusable?
There is no such thing as 100% security. There will be always new ways to hack or circumvent security.
That is not the only program that can do it. Trust me.
Security is a deterrent, nothing more. Once they have it physically, it does not matter what security you have. It can and will be taken.
The average user though is not specifically targeted. For anyone that is specifically targeted, eventually they can get the data.
Those cracking tools do no miracles. Read carefully their pages on your links and clues about how they work become obvious. As far as I can see there, they attempt to scan dumps to recover the encryption keys from memory dumps, hibernation files and I will add "maybe" the page file. As the encrypting tools need to have keys in memory to encrypt/decrypt data, that's the weak point, and the tools solely try is to retrieve those, then use them to mount the data back.
Avoiding the hibernation file to contain the keys is trivial. Don't hibernate the computer while using encrypted data, that is, unmount TrueCrypt drives before hibernating, or disable hibernation at all if using full-disk encryption.
Memory dumps can be disabled, I think, but can always be deleted following a BSOD if you want (not just delete, wipe the files with a specialized tool). To be completely paranoid, when powering off, give the computer a few minutes before someone else has access to it, to prevent cold-boot attacks.
The pagefile is probaly the hardest to avoid, as it relies on the encryption tool to prevent the keys from being paged out to disk. Any reputable tool should prevent this anyway. I'm not sure how to securely wipe the pagefile if it happens.
From one of your pages:
Meaning that, taken those precautions, brute force is the only reliable choice for those tools to crack your files, and with any decent encryption algorithm, it can take literally centuries to break into.NOTE: If the target computer is turned off and the encrypted volume was dismounted during the last hibernation, neither the memory image nor the hiberfil.sys file will contain the encryption keys. Therefore, instant decryption of the volume is impossible. In this case, Passware Kit assigns brute-force attacks to recover the original password for the volume.
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