How does hard drive encryption/decryption work?

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I mean, think about it. The person who is trying to decrypt the encrypted hard drive PHYSICALLY has the hard drive. There has to be some way to remove the insides of the hard drive and put it in a new one or something to completely ignore the encryption that happened. And how do they encrypt it? I mean, do they make modifications to the hard drive itself? It really confuses me how this works.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Encryption means secret codes.

You’re a British submarine officer in world war 2. You need to send a message to Churchill. “We’re in the English channel. The Germans are coming, send help!” But the Germans are listening. You don’t want them to hear it. You have a codebook. You use the codebook to translate each word so it makes no sense. “Five skies are tumescent. The dragon erupts at dawn, by jove!” You send the message. The Germans hear it. They can’t understand it. Churchill has the codebook. He translates the message back. He sends help.

Adolf Hitler gets a piece of paper on his desk. It says “=== BRITISH MESSAGE INTERCEPT === FIVE SKIES ARE TUMESCENT STOP THE DRAGON ERUPTS AT DAWN BY JOVE STOP”

There has to be some way to remove the insides of the paper and put the insides in a new paper to completely ignore the encryption that happened, right? And how do they encrypt it? Do they make modifications to the paper? No, they use a code book. And the paper is not modified. The message just makes no sense.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The data itself is encrypted before it’s sent to the hard drive to be stored. The hard drive doesn’t handle the encryption step (although technically, iirc some solid state drives by default encrypt data with their own internal key to prevent an attack involving disassembling the drive)

Without the key, what’s written on the hard drive will just appear as random data.

Anonymous 0 Comments

BinkuoI minsf Kn K lsjd LKj dfjk, Jhflkk dkLk dÉ.

Now you have the idea. The text above is *encrypted*. Even if you write on the wall with big letters, you will not able to read it. The encrypted data is not “locked” somehow, which can be “opened” if you try hard or smart, but “scrambled”, you need to have some *additional information* to “unscramble” it.