[Cryptography] How can you enter a 256-bit key in 12 decimal digits?

[Bill Cox]

On Tue, Jan 5, 2016 at 8:35 AM, Bill Cox <waywardgeek at gmail.com> wrote:

> Here's a lame FDE story about me.  I had a paranoid password on my Intel
> FDE-SSD in my laptop, which I've since given to my son for use in school.
> Every time the battery goes dead, which is about once a week, he has to
> re-entry my crazy long high entropy password.  The Intel FDE disk cannot
> change the password without wiping the drive (LUKS gets this part right),
> and I don't have time to do a full OS re-install.
>
> So, guess where my stupid supler-long painful password lives now?  It's
> taped to the laptop.  The complaint I get now is that I taped it on the
> bottom, and it is hard to flip the laptop over, type a few characters, flip
> it again, and so on.  He wants it taped to the screen.
>
> Bill
>

D'oh!  My mistake!  I read on the Lenovo help page that I cannot reset the
SSD key without losing all the data.  If I had read a bit more carefully, I
would have seen that this refers to the disk encryption key only, and not
the password used to decrypt the drive.  The same FAQ mentions that all I
have to do is go into the BIOS settings to change the disk encryption
password.

Thanks, Darren Lasko, for pointing out my error!  I'll go change the
password later today.  My son would thank you!

Now, apparently Darren knows a thing or two about disk encryption :)
 Darren, is there any chance you want to chime in?

Bill
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