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#backdoor#microsoft#bitlocker#pin#key#tpm#https#com#security#why
Discussion (43 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Other links:
https://github.com/Nightmare-Eclipse/YellowKey
https://github.com/Nightmare-Eclipse/GreenPlasma
> (Note: The YellowKey author disagrees that PIN is a protection
God I hate this stupid design of burying the decryption key in the TPM and hoping the software does not get fooled to reveal it.
Microsoft always sucks. Why don’t you ask for the password at boot time and derive the key from it. So much simpler and makes this kind of attacks impossible. Nobody is going to bypass LUKS or FileVault like this.
Does anyone really trust these shitty Windows laptop/desktop manufacturers to get these things right? These guys couldn't even get basic hardware features like trackpad drivers right.
author could become famous by being the first to proove an actual backdoor in an OS disk encryption
What will it take for more companies to truly understand their risks with Windows and being locked into Microsoft’s platforms?
That's what this is about. Microsoft doing bad security practices while trying to get away with it, leading to this outcome.
The researcher also claims to have another version ready which allows to also bypass TPM+PIN via a similar backdoor, which I'm inclined to believe.
Why do I believe that? 5 ring 0 zero days within 3 months are so statistically unlikely to be found, by the same person, in such a short time. Whoever this person is really knows their exploits, and must be in the league of Juan Sacco.
so I call bullshit on the PIN bypass
A USB stick containing a masterkey to decrypt a bitlocker volume is literally the definition of a backdoor.
Go on, try it out. It works.
It also doesn't help this comes from a person who likely was close to the development at Microsoft (one way or another) as their recent disclosures are quite alarming.
Of course, this could technically be the stars aligning type bug, but it seems like a purposefully planted backdoor to me.
Businesses use Microsoft because they figure if it’s backdoored it doesn’t matter and won’t affect them (because they aren’t terrorists or child pornographers or whatever, and they’d comply with a subpoena regardless of if Bitlocker is backdoored or not) and individuals who care about security and privacy put their shit on a Veracrypt drive somewhere else.
This is why operating systems like GrapheneOS disable the USB port on the initial boot to limit the attack surface that an attacker has.
This is like finding out that an OS accepts an SSH private key circulating online that the sysadmin for those OS boxes never authorized, and saying "wait, we don't know that this is a backdoor into that system, the attackers just found a bug".
That is not what happens. There is nothing wrong with decrypting the drive. If you just powered on the computer normally, it will "trigger the decryption." There just isn't way to read a file from the lock screen. This exploit is getting you to a state where the drive is unlocked but the user has access to a command prompt. A command prompt, unlike a basic login screen gives the user the ability to actually see the contents of arbitrary files.
>specific file name
It's a specific file name because Windows stores transaction logs under that name. If it was a random name it wouldn't be able to exercise this vulnerable code.
>also removing said files after this is achieved
It doesn't seem farfetched for a transaction log to be deleted after it is successfully replayed.
Nadella gives a press release, "Alright guys, you got us fair and square. Backdoor on Bootlocker. Various versions of it for years on behalf of the spooks."
You are unlikely to ever get a confirmation of wrong doing. That being said, for a first line security posture, there is no way external media should have anything to do with the encryption process. Even if the OS chose to read a USB drive, to also delete the magical files is ridiculously suspect.
It could always be plain old incompetence, but that is a damning level of technical ineptitude assigned to such critical infrastructure. This is not a project you assign to the intern, but paranoid security experts. Multiple levels of code review and red-teaming.
in your opinion
Though if TrueCrypt was killed to try and get people to switch to encryption that could be backdoored, then why allow its successor VeraCrypt to exist? It's open source and independently audited, so it really shouldn't be backdoored.
I've seen every variant of:
1) "this is an authentication/privilege escalation bug, not a bitlocker exploit" (? what are you even trying to say)
2) "even though the attacker explicitly warns that this is capable of bypassing TPM+PIN, that isn't actually true or what he meant"
3) "we shouldn't jump to conclusions that this is a backdoor"
4) "we already knew BitLocker with just TPM isn't secure" (? except many organizations depend on it to be)
It's such a ridiculous backdoor, trying to deny that this is the TAO bitlocker backdoor makes it so bad, no matter how Microsoft would try to spin it.
Either cryptography by Microsoft was never working in the first place (which means hundreds of people are absolutely incompetent)... or it is a backdoor for federal agencies. Either way, this is reaaally bad.
You just have to skip reading them because it seems there's no stopping those 100% genuine replies
Ideally you'd want that key to be further protected with a password or some other mechanism because it's not impossible to extract TPM keys.
And earlier
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48114997
I can't imagine there would be a way to bypass that if a password is required, unless it was a situation where like, there was originally some secret secondary key made that needs no password... or the password was never tied to the key in the first place.
[1]: https://deadeclipse666.blogspot.com/2026/05/were-doing-silen...
Do you know how hard discovering even one of those is? And how many months of work it takes?
That's the thing, we don't actually know how involved the PIN is in relation to the key... it might be completely separate (and hence bypassable).
Similarly I also wonder if password-based pre-boot auth is affected.