Supported on Mac OS X systems that have a 4K sector drive, and is not installed if you select the feature and then run the installer. Additionally, Symantec Drive Encryption is not compatible with Mac OS X 10.11 or later. As of version 10.4.1, Symantec Drive Encryption supports encryption using Apple® FileVault®2. When you run the Encryption. Oct 16, 2017 So I erased it using the gui; and formatted it as OS X Extended (Journaled). There was no option to erase it and reformat it as OS X Extended (Journaled) Encrypted. After the USB drive was erased, no partition was shown in the gui. I checked the USB drive using the diskutil 'list' command, and it showed no partitioning.
In this article, I will share with you how to open/read/ write BitLocker encrypted drive on macOS. It is easy to encrypt a hard drive or USB flash drive with BitLocker protection in Windows computer, which will allow only the authorized users to access the sensitive data. But what to do when you have to access the encrypted data on a Mac? As is known to all, BitLocker is not supported on Mac so that there is no direct way to open BitLocker drive on Mac. Luckily, there is a workaround for it, which makes it easy to use BitLocker encrypted drive on Mac.
You can use the third-party tool to gain access to the BitLocker encrypted drive. One such utility is macOS BitLocker Reader from Cocosenor. This software is compatible with Mac OS X 10.7 and higher versions. And helps users to unlock a wide range of storage devices like external hard drive, USB flash drive, SD card and etc. on Mac with the encryption password or recovery key file. What’s more, it supports the most popular file systems: FAT32, exFAT, and NTFS.
Unique Features of macOS BitLocker Reader
Cocosenor macOS BitLocker Reader offers the simplest way to unlock BitLocker drive on both Mac OS and Mac OSX. It is safe for the user to make good use of the BitLocker drive and transfer the data between the drive and Mac.
Open/Read/Write BitLocker Drive on Mac
With this BitLocker reader, you can open the BitLocker encryption drive on the Mac computer just as the same as on Windows. After the decryption, you can read, write, copy, and delete the content as freely as on Windows.
Two Ways to Unlock the BitLocker Drive
macOS BitLocker Genius is user-friendly so that it provides two ways to unlock the BitLocker drive. You can directly enter the password to decrypt the drive. If you forgot the password, you can utilize the recovery key file to mount the drive. You can choose either one to unlock the drive.
No Damage to the Encrypted Data
macOS BitLocker Reader only serves as the agent to connect the encryption drive with Mac. It will not cause any data loss to both the drive and the Mac. Also, if you cannot offer the password or recovery key, this software cannot help you to open the BitLocker drive.
Steps to Open BitLocker Drive on Mac
#Step 1: As the first step, free download the software and install macOS BitLocker Reader on your Mac.
#Step 2: Run the software and connect the BitLocker drive to your Mac and ignore the alert.
Step 3: Choose your drive and click the Unlock button.
Step 4: When prompted for the unlock window, you can enter the password or import the recovery key file. After that, click the Mount button.
Step 5: Once the drive has been decrypted, you can open the drive and access the files and folders to do what you want to do.
Please note that when you finish the content management on the drive, you should close the files and folders and then click the Eject button on the top pane of the software. It will help to protect your drive data securely.
Read Also: How to break BitLocker password and disable it
Final Words
Cocosenor macOS BitLocker Reader is worthwhile to purchase because of its ease of use and stable performance on Mac. Other than that, it offers a convenient way for users to reach the BitLocker drive data on macOS and Mac OSX. For the cross-platform users, it will save their time in file transformation.
FileVault is a disk encryption program in Mac OS X 10.3 (2003) and later. It performs on-the-fly encryption with volumes on Mac computers.
Versions and key features[edit]
FileVault was introduced with Mac OS X Panther (10.3),[1] and could only be applied to a user's home directory, not the startup volume. The operating system uses an encrypted sparse disk image (a large single file) to present a volume for the home directory. Mac OS X Leopard and Mac OS X Snow Leopard use more modern sparse bundle disk images[2] which spread the data over 8 MB files (called bands) within a bundle. Apple refers to this original iteration of FileVault as legacy FileVault.[3]
Mac OS X Lion (2011) and newer offer FileVault 2,[3] which is a significant redesign. This encrypts the entire OS X startup volume and typically includes the home directory, abandoning the disk image approach. For this approach to disk encryption, authorised users' information is loaded from a separate non-encrypted boot volume[4] (partition/slice type Apple_Boot).
FileVault[edit]
The original version of FileVault was added in Mac OS X Panther to encrypt a user's home directory.
Master passwords and recovery keys[edit]
When FileVault is enabled the system invites the user to create a master password for the computer. If a user password is forgotten, the master password or recovery key may be used to decrypt the files instead.
Migration[edit]Drive Encryption For Mac Os X 10 11
Migration of FileVault home directories is subject to two limitations:[5]
If Migration Assistant has already been used or if there are user accounts on the target:
If transferring FileVault data from a previous Mac that uses 10.4 using the built-in utility to move data to a new machine, the data continues to be stored in the old sparse image format, and the user must turn FileVault off and then on again to re-encrypt in the new sparse bundle format.
![]() Manual encryption[edit]
Instead of using FileVault to encrypt a user's home directory, using Disk Utility a user can create an encrypted disk image themselves and store any subset of their home directory in there (for example, ~/Documents/private). This encrypted image behaves similar to a Filevault encrypted home directory, but is under the user's maintenance.
Encrypting only a part of a user's home directory might be problematic when applications need access to the encrypted files, which will not be available until the user mounts the encrypted image. This can be mitigated to a certain extent by making symbolic links for these specific files.
Limitations and issues[edit]Backups[edit]Mac Drive Encryption
Without Mac OS X Server, Time Machine will back up a FileVault home directory only while the user is logged out. In such cases, Time Machine is limited to backing up the home directory in its entirety. Using Mac OS X Server as a Time Machine destination, backups of FileVault home directories occur while users are logged in.
Because FileVault restricts the ways in which other users' processes can access the user's content, some third party backup solutions can back up the contents of a user's FileVault home directory only if other parts of the computer (including other users' home directories) are excluded.[6][7]
Issues[edit]
Several shortcomings were identified in Legacy FileVault. Its security can be broken by cracking either 1024-bit RSA or 3DES-EDE.
Legacy FileVault used the CBC mode of operation (see disk encryption theory); FileVault 2 uses stronger XTS-AESW mode. Another issue is storage of keys in the macOS 'safe sleep' mode.[8] A study published in 2008 found data remanence in dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), with data retention of seconds to minutes at room temperature and much longer times when memory chips were cooled to low temperature. The study authors were able to use a cold boot attack to recover cryptographic keys for several popular disk encryption systems, including FileVault, by taking advantage of redundancy in the way keys are stored after they have been expanded for efficient use, such as in key scheduling. The authors recommend that computers be powered down, rather than be left in a 'sleep' state, when not in physical control by the owner.[9]
Early versions of FileVault automatically stored the user's passphrase in the system keychain, requiring the user to notice and manually disable this security hole.
In 2006, following a talk at the 23rd Chaos Communication Congress titled Unlocking FileVault: An Analysis of Apple's Encrypted Disk Storage System, Jacob Appelbaum & Ralf-Philipp Weinmann released VileFault which decrypts encrypted Mac OS X disk image files.[10]
A free space wipe using Disk Utility left a large portion of previously deleted file remnants intact. Similarly, FileVault compact operations only wiped small parts of previously deleted data.[11]
FileVault 2[edit]Mac File EncryptionSecurity[edit]
FileVault uses the user's login password as the encryption pass phrase. It uses the AES-XTS mode of AES with 128 bit blocks and a 256 bit key to encrypt the disk, as recommended by NIST.[12][13] Only unlock-enabled users can start or unlock the drive. Once unlocked, other users may also use the computer until it is shut down.[3]
Performance[edit]
The I/O performance penalty for using FileVault 2 was found to be in the order of around 3% when using CPUs with the AES instruction set, such as the Intel Core i and MacOS 10.10.3.[14] Performance deterioration will be larger for CPUs without this instruction set, such as older Core CPUs.
Master passwords and recovery keys[edit]
When FileVault 2 is enabled while the system is running, the system creates and displays a recovery key for the computer, and optionally offers the user to store the key with Apple. The 120 bit recovery key is encoded with all letters and numbers 1 through 9, and read from /dev/random, and therefore relies on the security of the PRNG used in macOS. During a cryptanalysis in 2012, this mechanism was found safe.[15]
Changing the recovery key is not possible without re-encrypting the File Vault volume.[3]
Validation[edit]
Users who use FileVault 2 in OS X 10.9 and above can validate their key correctly works after encryption by running sudo fdesetup validaterecovery in Terminal after encryption has finished. The key must be in form xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx and will return true if correct.[16]
Starting the OS with FileVault 2 without a user account[edit]Bitlocker Drive Encryption Mac Os X
If a volume to be used for startup is erased and encrypted before clean installation of OS X 10.7.4 or 10.8:
Drive Encryption For Mac Os X High Sierra Download
Apple describes this type of approach as Disk Password—based DEK.[12]
File Encryption For MacSee also[edit]References[edit]
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=FileVault&oldid=964582753'
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