PowerShell and BitLocker : The World of Encrypting and Decrypting Drives.

 

Encryption and Decryption. When these two words comes in my mind, visual images of some one seeing lots of 0 and 1 comes in my minds, like if you are seeing the Matrix movie.In geeky movies, or T.V series like Mr. Robot , the guys mainly seems to be using Linux :) command line utilities for encrypting hard drives or USB flash drives.

If you use external hard disk or USB drives to carry confidential data, then your disk must be encrypted,  in-case of loss of them , no one else should get the data from these drives.

In Windows we use the BitLocker to encrypted and decrypt drives. BitLocker uses the Trusted Platform Module (TPM)  microchip to store the cryptographic information.

To know more about BitLocker visit this link : http://windows.microsoft.com/en-in/windows-vista/bitlocker-drive-encryption-overview

In Windows 10, there is already module for BitLocker ( Awesome !!!!!, I am assuming this module is available in windows 8.1 too. ) .  That' means, we can encrypt and decrypt drives by using PowerShell too. Bravo!!!!

Let's check, what are the cmdlets are available in BitLocker PowerShell module.

Get-Command * -Module BitLocker 

 

OK!. Not much cmdlets, there see,to have some cmdlet only. Let' find out which cmdlet is let us see the list of all drives, including the encrypted ones.

 

 

Get-BitLockerVolume , is the cmdlet, which shows us the list of all drives, including the encrypting and non-encrypting ones.

 

Run  the cmdlet and you will get the error... because,  YOU HAVE TO RUN THESE CMDLETS , AS AS ADMINISTRATOR

Now ,Get-BitLockerVolume as as admin and you will see the below output. You can see, that it is showing us all drives, including, encrypting ones and and even showing the the Encryption Percentage status, 100% means, the disk is fully encrypted.

Cool!!! Now in next blog posts, we are going to encrypt one of our external drive :) 

Thanks for your time.

With Regards.

Aman Dhally

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