Microsoft Bitlocker

Bitlocker improves security but can complicate things

A password or PIN normally protects the contents of your Windows computer from prying eyes.

But what happens if someone removes the hard drive (or SSD) from your computer and attaches it via USB to another computer? In the past, it has been trivially easy to access the drive’s contents this way. Without needing the Windows password or PIN, the contents are there for all to see.

Bitlocker

So Microsoft developed “bitlocker” (which might not sound too bad as a noun, but sounds awful as a verb). Bitlocker just means encrypting the entire contents of the drive. This is invisible to the user in normal use (but some people claim that it slows things down a bit). If someone removes the drive and attaches it as an external drive elsewhere, the contents are still encrypted and safe from prying eyes.

To decrypt the information when the drive is not in its normal Windows environment, a “bitlocker key” is needed. The system assigns this when it “bitlockers” the drive (I wince at using that word as a verb).

Is bitlockering a new feature?

No, it’s been around for a while but the default used to be that drives were NOT bitlockered. That is now changing. If you buy a Windows computer today, it will almost certainly be bitlockered. New Windows 11 updates will also introduce bitlockering by default – see this from Tom’s Hardware

Am I bitlockered?

Windows 10 Home does not support bitlockering. In Windows 11, you can check whether your drive is bitlockered as follows:

• Click on the Start button
• Click on Settings
• Click on Privacy & Security
• Look to the switch to the right of the box headed “device encryption” and turn it on or off if desired

Help! I don’t know the bitlocker key

What if you don’t know the bitlocker key and you need it? For instance, your computer has died and you need to get data off the drive.

No problem (usually). Your Microsoft account holds details of the bitlocker keys for all your bitlockered devices. Just log into your Microsoft account, and go to https://aka.ms/myrecoverykey If this lists several keys, the one you need will be the one whose “ID” corresponds to the ID onscreen when you first try to access the bitlockered drive.

What if you can’t access your Microsoft account?

If you don’t know the password to access your Microsoft account then you will need to use another method to log into your account.

You will probably have included in your Microsoft account some “recovery information” – eg email address, mobile phone number. But supposing they don’t work? What if the email account you used to set up your Microsoft account is no longer valid and you lost your mobile phone and replaced it with a new one and a new SIM?

Now what are you going to do?

Your computer has died.
The encrypted data is inaccessible
You don’t know the key to decrypt it.
You can’t log into your Microsoft account to find the decryption key.

Moral of the story

If you don’t want to lose the family history you’ve been writing for 10 years (and that you haven’t quite got round to backing up yet), please log into your Microsoft account while you can, and provide several alternative methods by which you can access your account.

To add new methods of accessing your account,

• Log into the account
• Click on Security
• Check and/or add to the methods for accessing your account

 

You can also create a “recovery code” that will get you back into your account in the future. This is not the same as the bitlocker codes.

To create a recovery code, go to the “security” screen above and then:

• Scroll to the bottom of the page
• Click on “generate a new code”

 

If all else fails, ask Microsoft to help you get back into your account by visiting https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2214157. A word of warning – that could be tortuous and even unsuccessful.

I could have made this blog post very short indeed. I could just have said “please make sure you have several account access options registered in your Microsoft account”. But then you wouldn’t have got a flavour of the grief you can experience if you haven’t.

 

This might be a good time to look at these blog posts – Create your own simple password manager and Password checkers

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Post icon (featured image) designed by David Leonard with Microsoft Designer

Elephant image designed by David Leonard with Microsoft Designer

Screen grabs from Microsoft account

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