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Microsoft gave FBI set of BitLocker encryption keys to unlock suspects' laptops

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Re: Microsoft gave FBI set of BitLocker encryption keys to unlock suspects' laptops

#491

Post by zeroq »

I see two distinct problems here:

(1) false advertisement

Companies like MS and Apple are telling their clients they offer a way to encrypt and secure their data but at best these claims are only half truths, mostly smoke and mirrors.

This is not OK. I don't want to get into legal parts of it, because I'm sure there's a fine print there that literally says it's smoke and mirrors, but it's despicable that these claims are made in the first place.

(2) the real need of ironclad encryption

I was born and raised in Eastern Europe. When I was a teenager it was common that police would stop me and ask me to show them contents of my backpack. Here you had two options - either (a) you'd show them the contents or (b) you would get beat up to a pulp and disclose the contents anyway.

It's at least 5h debate whether that's good or not, but in my mind, for 90% of cases if you're law abiding citizen you can simply unlock your phone and be done with that.

Sure, there are remaining 10% of use cases where you are a whistleblower, journalist or whatever and you want to retain whatever you have on your phone. But if you put yourself in that situation you'd better have a good understanding of the tech behind your wellbeing. Namely - use something else.

Re: Microsoft gave FBI set of BitLocker encryption keys to unlock suspects' laptops

#492

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

ssl-3 wrote: post #238
LtdJorge wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teams inside a VM it is, then.

Or: Put all of Windows inside of a VM, within a host that uses disk encryption -- and let it run amok inside of its sandbox. I did this myself for about 8 years, from 2016-2024. During that time my desktop system at home was running Linux with ZFS and libvirt, with Windows in a VM. That Windows VM was my usual day-to-day interface for the entire system. It was rocky at first, but things did get substantially better a…

If you’re doing your work inside the windows machine, what protection does Linux as a host get you?

Re: Microsoft gave FBI set of BitLocker encryption keys to unlock suspects' laptops

#493

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

dgrunwald wrote: post #189
thewebguyd wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any power users who prefer their own key management should follow the steps to enable Bitlocker without uploading keys to a connected Microsoft account. Except the steps to to that are disable bitlocker, create a local user account (assuming you initially signed in with a Microsoft account because Ms now forces it on you for home editions of windows), delete your existing keys from OneDrive, then re-encrypt using y…

> make sure not to sign into your Microsoft account or link it to Windows again That's not so easy. Microsoft tries really hard to get you to use a Microsoft account. For example, logging into MS Teams will automatically link your local account with the Microsoft account, thus starting the automatic upload of all kinds of stuff unrelated to MS Teams. In the past I also had Edge importing Firefox data (including store…

>Nowadays you just need to assume that all data on Windows computers is available to Microsoft; even if you temporarily find a way to keep your data out of their hands, an update will certainly change that.

I get why the US would not, but I really wish the rest of the world looked at this like the security and sovereignty issue that it is.

Re: Microsoft gave FBI set of BitLocker encryption keys to unlock suspects' laptops

#494

Post by andwur »

thewebguyd wrote: post #129
Aurornis wrote: post #5

FYI BitLocker is on by default in Windows 11. The defaults will also upload the BitLocker key to a Microsoft Account if available. This is why the FBI can compel Microsoft to provide the keys. It's possible, perhaps even likely, that the suspect didn't even know they had an encrypted laptop. Journalists love the "Microsoft gave " framing because it makes Microsoft sound like they're handing these out because they lik…

> Any power users who prefer their own key management should follow the steps to enable Bitlocker without uploading keys to a connected Microsoft account. Except the steps to to that are disable bitlocker, create a local user account (assuming you initially signed in with a Microsoft account because Ms now forces it on you for home editions of windows), delete your existing keys from OneDrive, then re-encrypt using y…

They could have taken a more defence-in-depth approach to key storage and encrypted the cloud copy of the Bitlocker key with a random master key itself protected by a user password-derived key arrangement, with any crypto action occuring on the device to avoid knowledge of the plaintext key. That way the Bitlocker key stored in the cloud is opaque to Microsoft, and only by knowing the user's current cleartext password could they access the raw Bitlocker key.

The current approach is weak, and strikes me as a design unlikely to be taken unless all the people involved were unfamiliar with secure design (unlikely IMO), or they intentionally left the door open to this type of access.

Re: Microsoft gave FBI set of BitLocker encryption keys to unlock suspects' laptops

#495

Post by g-b-r »

theragra wrote: post #474
g-b-r wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People really pay too little attention to this attack avenue. It's both extremely convenient and very unlikely to be detected; especially given that most current systems are associated to an account. I'd be surprised if it's not widely used by law enforcement, when it's not possible to hack a device in more obvious ways. Please check theupdateframework.io if you have a say in an update system.

Isn't it the same with many Linux distros? Updates are using root to run?

It's largely the same for all automatic updating systems that don't protect against personalized updates.

I don't know the status of the updating systems of the various distributions; if some use server-delivered scripts run as root, that's potentially a further powerful attack avenue.

But I was assuming that the update process itself is safe; the problem is that you usually don't have guarantees that the updates you get are genuine.

So if you update a component run as root, yes, the update could include malicious code that can do anything.

But even an update to a very constrained application could be very damaging: for example, if it is for a E2EE messaging application, it could modify it to have it send each encryption key to a law enforcement agency.

Re: Microsoft gave FBI set of BitLocker encryption keys to unlock suspects' laptops

#496

Post by rz2k »

baka367 wrote: post #468
rz2k wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use macOS most of the time, but switch to a Windows VM for Excel. Without the same keyboard shortcuts, the macOS version ends up having a fraction of the power available to experienced users of the Windows version. For people who use Excel extensively, LibreOffice or Google Sheets would have to offer some remarkable new killer features to make it worth the switch. I don’t think feature parity alone would make the b…

Out of curiosity, why are the shortcuts different? I get the notion of shortcut conflicts, but, at a glance, this should be a trivial one click setup to set the desired shortcut config, wouldn’t it?

They are like Vim. “Alt,letter,letter,arrow,letter,letter,arrow,enter”, etc. Rather than a single combination of keys, it is a series of key presses.

I agree that it might be trivial to set up for spreadsheets, and it would be really useful for other spreadsheets, and many other applications. I suppose a hurdle is how context sensitive the commands are depending on the cell or range of cells activated, and their contents and data type.

Re: Microsoft gave FBI set of BitLocker encryption keys to unlock suspects' laptops

#497

Post by debazel »

Dwedit wrote: post #477
debazel wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly VeraCrypt is not optimized for SSDs and has a massive performance impact compared to Bitlocker for full disk encryption because the SSD doesn't know what space is used/free with VeraCrypt.

VeraCrypt can be set to pass through TRIM. It just makes it really obvious which sectors are unused within your encrypted partition (they read back as 00 bytes)

Oh I did not know of this option, thanks! However, I was wrong about the reason for the performance loss on high speed SSDs and the issue is actually related to how VeraCrypt handles IRPs: https://github.com/veracrypt/VeraCrypt/issues/136#issuecomme...

Re: Microsoft gave FBI set of BitLocker encryption keys to unlock suspects' laptops

#498

Post by vel0city »

direwolf20 wrote: post #392
layer8 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keys are stored securely in a TPM in the sense that a random program has no access to it. They are not stored safely there in the sense that they couldn’t possibly get destroyed. TPM hardware, or the motherboard that hosts it, occasionally fails. Or you might want to migrate your physical hard drive to a different PC. That’s the purpose of backing up the keys to the cloud. Alternatively, you can write down a recovery…

There's also no security in the communication between the CPU and the TPM, so you can plug in a chip that intercepts it and copies all the keys, or plug the TPM into a chip that pretends to be the CPU and derives identical keys.

The TPM on most computers these days is a sectioned off part of the CPU that only talks through channels on the package/die (fTPM). Good luck plugging something in on that.

Re: Microsoft gave FBI set of BitLocker encryption keys to unlock suspects' laptops

#499

Post by EasyMark »

ferrouswheel wrote: post #45

It's interesting how many comments these days are like, "well of course". Back in the day hackernews had some fire and resistance. Too many tech workers decided to rollover for the government and that's why we are in this mess now. This isn't an argument about law, it's about designing secure systems. And lazy engineers build lazy key escrow the government can exploit.

The engineers who developed this developed it to a spec so that microsoft demanded that allows them to get into the system at any time. There was nothing lazy about it. This would be easily found by anyone who has the impetus to encrypt their drive. Don't put things on your work laptop that you don't want Dom down in IT reading all of it or Phil the police forensics dick

Re: Microsoft gave FBI set of BitLocker encryption keys to unlock suspects' laptops

#500

Post by [deleted] »

hashstring wrote: post #387
scoofy wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But I forgot my password! You need to fix this!" The technology exists to trivially encrypt your data if you want to. That's not a product most people want, because the vast majority of people (1) will forget their password and don't want to lose their data, and (2) aren't particularly worried about the feds barging in and taking their laptop during a criminal investigation. That's not what the idealists want, but t…

Apple approaches it different with iCloud. You have a clear option to not hand these keys over. It shows that your idea of how the market works clearly is not representative of the actual market.

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