Flicking a button to turn something on is not what I'm talking about, that's normally the easy part of any setup, and I judge people harshly who only take that aspect of something into consideration when discussing systems.

Brittle is what happens when you haven't logged on to the machine in 60 days, trust with AD is broken, TPM has a glitch and wipes the in device key and forces you into recovery... or god forbid you service the laptop and now you have to enter recovery mode.

Then you're in a nightmare, trying to give someone a super long passphrase over the phone is a not-too-uncommon occurance.

That's assuming you have a good policy for storing the recovery keys. Too loose and they're handed out to everyone, sort of defeating the purpose: too strict and you need the IT department (or specific members), and its still predicated on the notion that you have a policy for it... Given that Admins are a dying breed... I don't think this is workable.

If you compare with Filevault on MacOS: which tracks the credentials of the logged in user; there's no "issue" if the device loses trust because ultimately you always use the real unlock key: not something cached in a "secure storage".

Having dealt with FileVault in this context, it's also frustrating; it's really common to have it fail to follow the logged-in user's credentials, and if you use any kind of federated login, you will frequently get users with FileVault passwords that are either ahead of or behind their system login password.

I think both approaches are valid trade-offs and I think that the default Secure Boot BitLocker configuration, for all its architectural tradeoffs, can probably be credited for an enormous amount of data loss mitigation originating from used hard drives alone.

maybe i am missing something, but how did veracrypt solve all of the admin and policy issues you’re bringing up? (specifically for large enterprise fleets)