Adding Special Characters to Passwords - Bitlocker?

You can add characters like ¡ and/or ƒ by using NumLk and a keypad with alt + code.

Does bitlocker accept these symbols? I wouldn't want to lock myself out.

It seems like an easy way to make a password much more secure, instead of just having to bruteforce the alphabet + numbers + symbols you would have to bruteforce alphabet + numbers + symbols + special characters, which brings your character set up from around 90 to nearly 300.

 

Well... bitlocker let me add ¡ but when I tried typing it after a restart it wouldn't let me... so I had to reset the password. Oh well.

 

Thank you for doing the research. If I locked myself out it would be a permanent situation.
Happy New Year.
Hugger

 

You too.

It's a shame that I can't enter special characters for bitlocker. It works if you don't use it for an OS drive that you boot into - you can enter it to decrypt another drive while you're already booted into windows.

 

There's no need to use those special characters.

-https://www.grc.com/haystack.htm

 

Sure, I could just put "aaaaaaa" a thousand times too.

Adding a special character makes your password significantly more difficult to crack. Adding a single ¡ or ¤ means that someone would have to bruteforce 260 characters instead of 94.

My current password is definitely strong enough - it would be faster to invest time into cracking AES than to try to crack my password - but it would be nice if I could simply increase the character said.

 

Well, obviously that's not the intent for creating a strong pw, and that point is made on that page.

Even going with the 94 types, restricting the order and allowing repetiiton, only a 14 character pw will give 4.93+e27 combinations. A rather imposing task to brute force, to say the least. Mine is "only" 12 characters and it would take according to the haystack 1.04 yrs in a massive cracking array.

Chronomatic puts things nicely into perspective in post #6 of this thread. One can see it's easy to get ridiculously paranoid with passwords, although, admittedly, if my life depended on keeping my data secret, I could see my pw being a heck-of-a lot stronger than my current one

 

Yeah, it's not some critical thing. But instead of having a 16 character password take X years you can have a shorter password take longer by tripling the character set size.

I'm just saying it would be nice. I'm not worried that my passwords will be cracked, the reason I use bitlocker isn't even for security it's for curiosity, but I still think they should support those characters.

I don't think they can though. Those characters are ASCII and supported by Windows, which bitlocker runs before I guess.

 

I know what you mean if the special characters are available, but don't they require a "Ctrl+ 3 digit" combination, at least with the Alt key codes?

 

Does this help?

Start gpedit.msc as an administrator, then:

Computer Configuration → Administrative Templates → Windows Components → BitLocker Drive Encryption → Operating System Drives → Allow enhanced PINs for startup

"This policy setting allows you to configure whether or not enhanced startup PINs are used with BitLocker.

Enhanced startup PINs permit the use of characters including uppercase and lowercase letters, symbols, numbers, and spaces. This policy setting is applied when you turn on BitLocker.

If you enable this policy setting, all new BitLocker startup PINs set will be enhanced PINs.

Note: Not all computers may support enhanced PINs in the pre-boot environment. It is strongly recommended that users perform a system check during BitLocker setup.

If you disable or do not configure this policy setting, enhanced PINs will not be used."