Decrypt a USB flash drive encrypted with BitLocker

[16xypjnxlrew]

Have you made any "system image backup" of the C:\ drive? Not System Restore.

Have you ever imaged your system to an external drive using Macrium or Acronis or something like that?

Or have you ran a cloud backup program like Backblaze?

Those are pretty much your only hopes of finding the recovery key.

No, I never created a backup image of the system from the disk because I only have one hard drive. There was no cloud backup either

[NotATether]

No, I never created a backup image of the system from the disk because I only have one hard drive. There was no cloud backup either

It is useful!

Think about it for the future.

Personally I have OneDrive and Backblaze backing up the files on my computer. OneDrive only backs up documents and stuff while Backblaze uploads everything, and then on top of that I also have a custom Windows system image creation powershell script that images to my external drive, and also does a Windows Backup and Restore after it is done.

It's already saved my ass before after Codex accidentally deleted all the files on my C:\ partition, especially the Backblaze where I pulled my unpublished app's source code from, which I had thought was gone for good because I didn't push the git commits.

[16xypjnxlrew]

Provide sources of your claim when someone managed to crack a "good" Bitcoin private key!

As of 2019, they had only managed to discover 7 private keys. I don’t know how many they had discovered by 2025, but it seems that all those claims about spending billions years to crack a key are just a smokescreen to make everyone believe it’s difficult or impossible similar to the illusion created by the Enigma machine. These people showed the whole world that this is a myth and that encryption has weaknesses built into it not to mention something like a 48-digit recovery key

Back into the rabbit hole, I quickly discovered the Large Bitcoin Collider.

https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/about

Wow this is a serious project.
Basically thousands of distributed servers generating and checking 26 Trillions (!!!) of private keys on a daily basis.
Over the first three years, they managed to find 7 private keys. That’s a lot! I imagined the odds were much lower., but probably there is some kind of bug in some wallet utilising a suboptimal random number generator to create keys. (Further research needed here!)

[Cricktor]

The cipher of the Enigma machine had flaws which made it possible to break it with technology around times of World War 2. First broken by Polish mathematicians, later sharing their work with Alan Turing who with his team at Bletchley Park was able to setup a sufficiently quick Enigma code cracking machinery.

The main exploitable flaw was that the Enigma machine never enciphered a symbol to itself. The German engineer Arthur Scherbius who invented the Enigma thought that was a smart decision. He was wrong.

Some sources:
Own knowledge about the Enigma and its flaws.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666389920300118
https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/second-world-war/how-alan-turing-cracked-the-enigma-code
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma


I'm not too worried about so far progress of the Large Bitcoin Collider (LBC). Being able to check some trillions of private key per day isn't something to worry about compared to size of private key space. I suggest to do your own math, if capable, to check how long it would take to search for a specific private key, even when we consider to have to search in only about the half of the available key space on average (half of 2²⁵⁶ is 2²⁵⁵, btw).

I believe in math, in numbers, in solid cryptography. Random Bitcoin private keys are safe because we don't have the time and energy to successfully search and find specific ones. So far SHA-256 and RIPEMD-160 are safe and unbroken hash functions. The safety of e.g. legacy Bitcoin addresses (P2PKH) relies on that you can't find a 160-bit hash collision at any human time-scale to be able to spend such coins. Otherwise ~79,957BTC won't be safe at Bitcoin public address 1FeexV6bAHb8ybZjqQMjJrcCrHGW9sb6uF, funded on 2011-03-01 10:26:19 UTC, more than 15 years ago.

I don't know if the seven (and potentially more) private keys found by LBC were of any "good randomness/entropy".

Weak entropy private keys are not safe and never were, that's why decent Bitcoin wallets should never generate weak entropy and use it for private keys. Period!

Believe what you want, I'm not going to make extra effort to try to convince you. If you think there are smokescreens hiding potential weaknesses of Bitcoin, it's up to you.

I don't see from what I know about Bitcoin's inner mechanics and cryptography any sufficient weakness as long as "good" entropy was used to produce private keys. Humans are currently, and unlikely in next decades too, able to crack 160-bit space problems when good entropy and cryptography was in place, not enough time and energy on this planet available. At least, that's what I believe in. YMMV.