by pregnenolone | 2026-01-24 11:54:18+00:00
I’m not trying to defend Microsoft, but so much of the stuff here is just painful to read. People shouting about backdoors, FBI, Linux, VeraCrypt – in completely bizarre combinations. It's astonishing what kind of garbage people come up with based on a superficial understanding of the topic.

First of all, the fact that Windows uploads recovery keys to Microsoft accounts is nothing new and has been known for a long time; I can partially understand why they do it. Essentially, it's a good thing that Windows applies full disk encryption by default because no one wants their data compromised if their device gets stolen. Your average thief won’t be able to steal any data from a device protected with BitLocker’s TPM-based encryption, and if it’s protected with a PIN, not even a sophisticated thief shouldn't be able to do so – unless an AMD fTPM is 'protecting' the key, but that’s a whole different topic. The problem with TPM-based encryption is that updates can and often do break the boot measurement process, and in this case, the user will need a recovery key. It’s a difficult problem to fix because unlike Macs, PCs are inherently hardware-diverse – with multiple manufacturers and varying firmware implementations etc. I do criticize their approach though. I think users should be able to opt out easily without having to fiddle with the CLI. Also recovery keys could and should be e2e encrypted.

If you're a concerned Bitlocker user, the recovery key can be removed from the header itself and replaced with a new one that won’t be uploaded unless you choose to. There's no need to decrypt the device first. Look up the manage-bde docs.

Anyway, calling this a backdoor is a bit misleading and I find it funny when people start talking about backdoors, the FBI let alone the CIA. If you're worried about the CIA, all bets are off anyway. It's silly for me to even mention this.

If you assume Microsoft software is inherently comproimised, using Veracrypt shouldn't make much of a difference because implementing a hidden Veracrypt backdoor on top of Windows would be truly trivial for Microsoft. And, to be fair, in the Linux world it's not all roses and sunshine either. TPM-based encryption on Linux remains quite flawed, and has been for years now, as I already mentioned in a previous comment [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46708174] which is not really the case with Bitlocker (let's ignore the whole TPM parameter encryption thing). If I were thinking like most people here, I would be claiming that LUKS developers have been compromised – claming this would be why these issues haven’t been fixed for years on Linux.

What I’m trying to say is that pretty much all FDE implementations have flaws, and above all, security isn't black and white. In my opinion , Microsoft should fix these:

- Let users opt out of FDE and storing recovery keys on their accounts easily from the very beginning.

- Remove the 20-character limit on PIN protectors and make them alphanumeric by default. Windows 11 already requires TPM 2.0, so there’s no need for such limitations anymore.

- Enable parameter encryption on TPM based encryption. As already mentioned, Win 11 requires TPM 2.0 anyway.

- Let users switch to password-based encryption without having to fiddle with policies or manage-bde. Also, they should update BitLocker’s KDF from spamming SHA256 a million times to something memory-hard like Argon2.