Recovering encrypted data from flash drive

I have a Lexar Jumpdrive that came with a program installed on it called Secure II

This program allowed me to create an encrypted "Vault" which is just a dedicated chunk of data that is all encrypted with the same key. There is just one problem however... I FORGOT MY KEY!!!

Any hackers out there who know a way to recover this data?

Josh

Posted 2009-12-17T16:46:33.633

Reputation: 101

Answers

This device feature 256-bit AES native encryption, looks like a little bit hard to overcome especially if you don't remember how many characters, numbers, letters or sign are used. This doesn't mean, that is impossible.

EDIT : Looking at many USB encrypted-drive, maybe, there is a simple walk-around : Many usb keys, have a limit of password insert attempts, usually 4 or 5, after those, the key format the drive... but remove also the AES encryption and doesn't shred the files, then you could recover with a program like Ontrack easily your datas. BUT BE CAREFULL... this operation is risky because the USB drives are not all the same there are some as IRONKEY, that shred totally all datas, then if you want to try is at your risk.

Акула

Posted 2009-12-17T16:46:33.633

Reputation: 183

It would be nice if it did that, but the program just locks you out of the vault until you restart the application. – Josh – 2009-12-17T18:48:43.513

If you can come up with a way to crack AES-256, there's a lot of people who will be very interested indeed. – David Thornley – 2009-12-17T22:38:33.127

There are some theories about a possible way to overcome AES but here we go on crypto-analysis field that require competences that i don't have. I think that a real revolution on this sector could be possible when we could employ new GPGPU computing techniques. – Акула – 2009-12-18T00:34:32.093

I don't see what the question has to do with "hacking". With no information as to how the data was encrypted, which algorithm / hash was used, the key cipher size I'm afraid there's no way to recover. Even with these, decrypting is not that simple. I really doubt if you can recover them.

Sathyajith Bhat

Posted 2009-12-17T16:46:33.633

Reputation: 58 436