It occurs to me that barcode scanner is an adjacent idea and probably has some versatility advances. Really what they wanted was a way to send stored keystrokes from one PC to another and the barcode was just a commonly available way to do it.
For some ungodly reason, this personal laptop to be used for watching netflix had bitlocker turned on by default. 48 digit keys are obscene. It was so painful to try any triage or repair step because every single reset would require typing in all 48 digits. It's so stupid.
Meanwhile, what wasn't turned on automatically? System restore. God forbid you set aside 20gb for a chance at recovery. I had to reinstall from raw Windows installer. Now the speakers don't work, because Asus doesn't aknowledge that they've even sold this model of laptop, only showing drivers for the version of the laptop with an OLED screen, which uses a different wifi chipset and audio chipset, so it keeps trying to stomp over the drivers!
I've used this on our fresh windows installs for years
It didn't even install the missing/incorrect driver! Asus's nagware that got autoinstalled by windows update managed to install the correct one, which is insane because I feel like I installed 5 different versions of the exact driver Asus asked to install while troubleshooting and there was zero sound each time. WTF.
Anyway, that app is way too aggressive. It's just throwing Hardware IDs against some list and installing whatever it finds and that's not how Hardware IDs can work in practice.
Disclaimer: not affiliated, just a happy customer
I am now using my Flipper Zero for such things including entering passwords at our Dashboards.
The obfuscation might prevent the intern from figuring out what is going on, but there are plenty of barcode-scanning apps for phones that show you the data stored in a barcode.
Windows can find that automatically!
If you have 5 IT workers processing 200 remote employees at each office and the resolution takes only 5 minutes, you can get the work done in 3 hours. Building USB keys and waiting for them to be mailed out for every employee probably takes longer than it took to write the basic barcode script.
How can you rotate the bitlocker key? I was under the impression that it’s permanent.
I don't follow this, what could they have done with QR codes?
I had my own cheat sheet to reprogram it, eg. changing the final character to tab or enter, scan on trigger press or always scan. It struggled a little with black barcodes on navy blue labels, but that's a terrible idea anyway.
This is actually usually a mode of the barcode scanner that can be configured by ... scanning a special barcode.
> That response could not, however, involve distributing BitLocker keys – doing so was just too risky to contemplate.
So instead they distributed the BitLocker keys but wrapped in a barcode?
I mean using a barcode scanner as ad-hoc keyboard input automation is nice but this theatrical approach to computer security is not encouraging.
Not that someone was going to listen in and steal it
The actual key key is not changeable, but the "recovery key" is not actually the key (or a representation of it) but is another password that unlocks the actual key. As already mentioned, this can be done in one click on an admin console, and even on personal systems you could change it (even to all zeroes if you're stupid enough) using the manage-bde command-line program.
I know this because I had a PC where Microsoft insisted on installing a broken GPU driver that left me with nothing but a black screen. I had to install windows on that PC with it disconnected from the internet because if Windows Update merely got wind of the driver existing it would insist on downloading and installing it even after disabling driver updates.
It seems like the disable option is hidden in the advanced tab of the ancient computer properties dialog, I can't remember seeing it in the mess of new settings menus but those change all the time so I don't really bother learning them anyway.
As annoying as I think it is that they let the hardware manufacturers include software like that in the bundles uploaded to Windows Update, I wouldn't be surprised if they're actually offering the experience most people expect (the software is a part of the product's whole feature set after all).