There has been a lot of media coverage about Bitlocker recently. It is supposed to be a solution for laptop users who want to encrypt their whole hard disks under Vista. You can’t encrypt your whole system partition with Truecrypt, but, in my view, is a much better solution if you want to secure confidential data.

Update: Please, also check out my review about TrueCrypt 5.

I’ve read several instructions on how to install Bitlocker (print), and it always seemed to be quite complicated to me. If you make a mistake, you might not be able to boot up again. If you plan to deploy Vista on your laptop fleet with Bitlocker, you should be prepared to take some time until you fully understand how Bitlocker works.

I remember well when EFS (Encrypting File System) was first introduced with Windows 2000. It had so many problems in the beginning, and it even was possible to crack it. That’s why, I wouldn’t trust Bitlocker. It is new, and I am sure it contains bugs.

In Windows XP, and probably also in Vista, EFS is more reliable, but it still has some shortcomings. If someone gets access to the hard disk, he can at least read the file names. So he can guess what kind of data you encrypted. I also think that the handling of the encryption key is too complicated. Another problem is that all encrypted data is always accessible after the user has logged on. Essentially, this means that malware started by this user also has access to this data. The last issue also applies to Bitlocker.

Truecrypt doesn’t have these shortcomings and it is much easier to handle in my view. Most importantly, you only mount a volume when you really need access to the confidential data. Since it is a free tool, it will only cost you time to download it. I reviewed Truecrypt a while ago, so I won’t describe it again. The major new feature of version 4.3 certainly is that it officially supports Vista now.

Leave a Comment | Subscribe RSS | Newsletter |