this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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At most organizations I have worked at (both IT and cybersecurity), decryption keys will be centrally managed. With some technologies (e.g. Bitlocker), it's possible to have multiple passwords which can be used to decrypt the drive, and it could be possible for the user to have one only they know. However, there isn't a logging mechanism to verify which password was used to unlock the drive, leaving the issue of non-repudiation. This could probably be fixed by having some sort of system which logs which user unlocked the drive, but that would be a very hard thing to do securely. Any such log would need to be in a space the bootloader can reach and write to, and now that location needs to be secured in a way which prevents a malicious actor from modifying the log. At that point, we're quickly arriving at having TPM and we might as well go whole hog and just do TPM and secure boot. Which is a great bit of technology; but, now only proves that the system hasn't been tampered with.
As a tangent, the reason most organizations centrally manage drive encryption keys is the need to unlock the drive, in the event the user is no longer able to. If you win the lottery, turn your laptop in and run off to parts unknown, the organization may want to unlock the laptop to recover anything you were working on. So, they need access to the decryption key.
Ultimately the problem is that the encryption password and your user account password are solving different security problems and there isn't a lot of good overlap between the two.