This one is especially fun on windows 11 home. At least it was some time ago on some machine i worked on. Since home doesn't have the bitlocker settings fully you cannot disable bitlocker encryption. It would also auto enable sometimes even if you don't have a microsoft account, which means it doesn't back the key up anywhere. Not sure it does that anymore, i hope not, but i expect a lot of people to lose their data to this crap in the future.
In either case at least i find that full disk encryption on most machines is just overkill as it only really protects in the scenario the device is stolen and someone tries to pull data off of it that way. But in the vast majority of cases when people get their data stolen its done with malware, which disk encryption does /nothing/ to prevent.
Microsoft NEVER cares about your security. They just do the absolute bare minimum for compliance with stupid standards, and then advertise it as some crazy security improvement. Corporations lie to you all the time. If you want some actual security, you need to start using FOSS software. Most importantly a FOSS, Linux-based OS, and set it up with LUKS passphrase-based encryption.
This has been happening for a lot longer than just Windows 11.
Several people I've spoken to, who have purchased OEM computers from the likes of Dell, HP, Lenovo and others, did not know that bitlocker FDE was enabled, and they were not aware that they needed to back up their recovery key.
On at least one occasion, this caused someone to lose the contents of their laptop when Windows failed to finish booting into the OS. The drive was fine as far as I could tell, but the content on the drive would not complete the boot up sequence and would bsod/boot loop the system, so data retrieval was not possible without the recovery key, which they did not have. That was a Windows 10 Dell system from 2020 or so.
My opinion is that FDE is a good thing.
My advice is if you have FDE enabled, backup your recovery keys. It's easy, but it won't directly save to a file on the filesystem that's locked by the key to which the recovery key applies. The easiest workaround is to "print" it, then use the built in Microsoft print to PDF, then dump it wherever you want. Afterwards, put it somewhere safe. Doesn't matter where, but anywhere that isn't the encrypted drive. Maybe Google drive, maybe a USB flash drive, maybe email it to yourself. I dunno, just somewhere you can retrieve if that system isn't working.
When you're done doing that, go check the same on your parents computers, friends, brothers and sisters..... If they're someone you care about, and they have a windows computer, check. Get those recovery keys backed up somewhere.
It's good, for privacy and all of course, but I remember here a Dell BIOS upgrade that basically wiped the TPM2.0 and so windows was asking for the recovery bitlocker key at boot. I have them on a encrypted USB key and anyway I can access my MS account from another device to find the key and type it.
But I'm sure a lot of people will basically say "well, fuck, I don't have the key", guaranteed.
This is good but they need better guidance to nontechnical users how to backup their keys. Cloud backup now that they are trying to make local accounts illegal I suppose.
I think this is a step in the right direction. Everyone can lose a portable device or it can get stolen, so protecting the potentially sensitive data is important.
I think what people are complaining about is not full-disk encryption itself, but the fact that people are not used to being responsible for their cryptographic keys.
I think we should educate people regarding this responsibility. We did it with regular keys we use to unlock our homes.
Tom’s Hardware tested this software version of BitLocker last year and found it could slow drives by up to 45 percent.
WTF‽ In Linux full disk encryption overhead is minimal:
While in pure I/O benchmarks like FIO there is an obvious impact to full disk encryption and other synthetic workloads, across the real-world benchmarks the performance impact of running under full disk encryption tended to be minimal
There's like five million ways you can use disk encryption on Linux though and not all of them are very performant. So keep that in mind if you see other benchmarks showing awful performance (use the settings Phoronox used).
I suspect Microsoft made some poor decisions in regards to disk encryption (probably because of bullshit/insecure-by-design FIPS compliance) and now they're stuck with them.
yeah, no kidding, a real bitch if you want to back up your systems, and the hit to processing speed is significant, though with it enabled, the days of popping out a hard drive, and grabbing whatever the hell's on there with a usb connection are over
I use FDE on every x86 Linux system I have. I'd use it in Windows too but besides being proprietary, Bitlocker can't be interpreted outside of Windows.
My primary workstation has several different operating systems connected for testing purposes (most shared data is on ntfs; need to be able to access application data on system root) and this would kind of mess with my workflow.
E: seems my information is outdated - there are now several methods for accessing bitlocker encrypted drives from Linux :)
Do the average Windows user really need BitLocker device encryption? They don't. The only users who need BitLocker are business' and government workers.
Also 99% of Windows users are going to get locked out of their computers.
The anti-MS here is annoying. They set up online accounts by default to improve usability and its complaints about privacy. They set up full disk encryption at rest by default to improve privacy and its complaints about usability.