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The suspect is currently not in police custody (he was released on bail almost immediately) and there is no evidence of physical threats. He continues to mainta

The suspect is currently not in police custody (he was released on bail almost immediately) and there is no evidence of physical threats. He continues to maintain his claim of innocence, while the police claim the decrypted drive incriminates him heavily, so it's unlikely he gave them a password himself. Can you elaborate about the brute force attacks? I thought if the encryption is strong enough brute forcing it would not be possible?

LinuxBender 7y ago
There are forensic tools that grab {n} number of sectors from the drive image, then upload it to a cloud that has a massive farm of servers that brute force the blocks using all known ciphers and strings. Brute forcing anything is possible, especially if using symmetric encryption only. The CPU cycles (and cost) to break the passphrase depend on the complexity. If the disk encryption used a combination of a strong passphrase and a large key (usb device, etc) then the probability of decrypting the drive becomes highly unlikely. Anyway, I am no lawyer, but the person should assume the police are lieing either way. Their lawyer should have told them this and to keep their mouth shut. The police could be playing mind games. Mind games are the cheapest way to decrypt a drive or get someone to admit guilt.