I have drives that I fully encrypted when doing various tests etc and I forgot the passwords. What if you are forced to decrypt for some reason and you actually don’t remember the passwords? Im too lazy to secure erase a bunch of disks I don’t use but I guess I should get to it eventually. It’s just crazy how someone may force you to decrypt and they think you are lying but you actually do not remember the password. You are just supposed to get tortured there or go to jail forever cause you forgot a password?
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Yes, depending which threat model you have.
If its of any comfort to OP. Typically torture / jail is happening regardless if the password is recovered or not in that type of situation.
I wouldn’t worry about doing this unless you plan to travel with those disks or have an elevated risk of getting raided/searched.
The (presumed) fact that it’s impossible for someone to prove they forgot some piece of information after being exposed to it is problematic.
This paragraph diverges from your question, about forgetting a password, but something that may or may not work, assuming the story is true, is to assert you never had/remembered the password to begin with, and, assuming you know, explain how the encrypted volumes were created. For instance, you randomly generated the password and then just copy/paste the password when creating an encrypted volume. No guarantees but using technologies that demonstrate inability to comply while maintaining security may prevent/stop torture or jail time thus reduce risk of such violence. One that comes to mind is Cypherlock.
One particularly poignant point made by Smuggler was that, with Cypherlock, privacy is not assured by concealment, but rather by transparency (‘hiding vs. verifiable destruction’). It’s orders of magnitude easier to provably demonstrate that you can no longer access data than it is to convince an adversary that you’re not hiding it in the first place.
My first question would be why would you bother traveling with an encrypted drive that is essentially just waiting for a wipe and re-use? Just seems like dead weight. I don’t speak or read Japanese, so why would I travel with a few hard cover books written in Japanese?
You could always do a cursory reformat for travel since the data is gone forever anyway. That way there’s nothing functionally to “decrypt” on a cursory look, and you can still do a secure wipe later.
And your opportunity here is to say that you’re bringing the drives for professional attempt to brute force decrypt them because they’re full of cat videos you can’t live without, and make an appointment with a professional data recovery service to show up in person. Something very official with emails and a paper trail. Then cancel that appointment later when you “realize” you can just do a secure wipe yourself.
Strong encryption doesn’t distinguish between refusing and genuinely being unable to decrypt — if the key is gone, the data is gone.
The legal risk depends on jurisdiction, which is why securely erasing unused encrypted drives is often the safest choice.