Why do they call it "drive encryption" when it does not need a user-provided password or other key?
this post was submitted on 13 May 2026
929 points (99.6% liked)
Technology
84646 readers
4308 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
TPM microslop magic.
What's even funnier is that we already have TCG, ISE, and SE drives that hardware encrypt AES256 by design, so you still get at least an instant delete option if you never bother to set a key.
Windows wants to double screw you over by never telling you it added a key, and then leaving you dead in the water if your TPM breaks, and then also failing to maintain their own TPM requirements making it completely useless lol.
Bitlocker has done nothing but greatly inconvenience me.
Anything that isn't open source can't be secure. That doesn't mean that everything open source is secure though.
Finally, some good news. Now I can stop having to interact with my companies shitty outsourced service desk when I need a Bitlocker key.
BitLocker is basically malware, so who fucking cares. Far more people have it accidentally on and get locked out than people that have purposefully activated it.
You have just reminded me I could use this on the laptop my mother set up like five years ago and immediately forgot the password for.
load more comments
(5 replies)
Somebody on twitter “reverse engineered” the exploit. Apparently ms shipped debug code in production. At least it’s not called Backdoor_FBI outright.
How it works:
- Recovery tools look for a config file called RecoverySimulation.ini on the OS drive
- If Active=Yes, it enables "test mode" for the recovery tools
- Test mode unlocks your BitLocker drive but a flag called FailRelock tells it to skip relocking
- cmd.exe spawns with full access to your "encrypted" drive
Does test mode unlock without the key?!? So it's just "encrypted" with a generic key, and the unlock key is for authentication? That sounds insane, even for microsoft.
this works because the bitlocker key is stored in the TPM of the mainboard on the computer.
That is neccessary for the computer to be able to boot without entering your bitlocker password.
you can configure it differently, but that is not default or super obvious to do.
It always struck me as...poor...to not require a password for decryption. If you require zero knowlege from me, that means a stolen has everything inside needed to decrypt all the data.
And well, lookie there at the article!
"Ah yes, but think about how much faster they shipped that code with Copilot doing all the heavy lifting."
- Some Microsoft exec, probably
😮💨
Picture got me confused. Do you use a usb stick or a hammer?
Both?
There was a reason for disappearance of TrueCrypt
TrueCrypt was forked into VeraCrypt, which is still maintained.
load more comments
(4 replies)
Closed source security mechanism has backdoor
More news at 9
of course there's a back door. You motherfuckers think they'll TPM secure boot lock file manage SECURTYYYY and not let five eyes waltz in whenever they fucking well please?
microslop. Im saying since 30 years, microslop is da shit. A big pile...
I guess LUKS is safe.
From their blog:
Now regarding YellowKey, lots of you are wondering how does one even find such backdoor ?
I'll tell you how, it took me more time trying to get it to work than the amount of sleep I had in two years combined. No AI involved, no help in any shape or form. I could have made some insane cash selling this but no amount of money will stand between me and my determination against Microsoft.
[...]
I can't wait when I will be allowed to disclose the full story, I think people will find my crashout very reasonable and it definitely won't be a good look for Microsoft.
Looking forward to the full story.
load more comments
(4 replies)
YellowKey can be triggered simply by merely copying some files to a USB stick and rebooting to the Windows Recovery Environment. We tested this ourselves, and sure enough, not only does it work, it bears all the hallmarks of a backdoor, down to the exploit's files disappearing from the USB stick after it's used once.
load more comments
(4 replies)
view more: next ›