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Microsoft Has Your Encryption Key If You Use Windows 10 (theintercept.com)
An anonymous reader writes with this bit of news from the Intercept. If you login to Windows 10 using your Microsoft account, your computer automatically uploads a copy of your recovery key to a Microsoft servers. From the article: "The fact that new Windows devices require users to backup their recovery key on Microsoft's servers is remarkably similar to a key escrow system, but with an important difference. Users can choose to delete recovery keys from their Microsoft accounts – something that people never had the option to do with the Clipper chip system. But they can only delete it after they've already uploaded it to the cloud.....As soon as your recovery key leaves your computer, you have no way of knowing its fate. A hacker could have already hacked your Microsoft account and can make a copy of your recovery key before you have time to delete it. Or Microsoft itself could get hacked, or could have hired a rogue employee with access to user data. Or a law enforcement or spy agency could send Microsoft a request for all data in your account, which would legally compel them to hand over your recovery key, which they could do even if the first thing you do after setting up your computer is delete it. As Matthew Green, professor of cryptography at Johns Hopkins University puts it, 'Your computer is now only as secure as that database of keys held by Microsoft, which means it may be vulnerable to hackers, foreign governments, and people who can extort Microsoft employees.'"
I would like to know the opinion of large public corporations security officer on this feature of windows.
How about you don't login with a Microsoft account? That'll show them!
So one important thing to remember is that these keys don't give anyone a login or remote access to your box whatsoever. Instead, Windows 10 now turns on disk encryption by default. That's a good thing, but of only limited value since disk encryption really only helps if the disk is physically stolen from you.
So what we have here is a copy of the key that allows recovery of an encrypted disk being stored in the cloud unless you delete it. Not the greatest thing ever but it doesn't panic me all that much when the same people who scream about not upgrading to Windows 10 because OMG NSA are also running old systems without any disk encryption whatsoever.
To put it another way: The vast VAST majority of Linux systems in operation that don't use full disk encryption are actually LESS secure than this setup simply because there's no need to get your hands on a recovery key to decrypt anything. Yes, I'm well aware that Linux systems with full-disk encryption exist. So what, they did (and still do) on Windows too.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Good to remember, that Congress just passed new (clearing companies to share any data with the NSA directly without liability) surveillance legislation tucked into the 2015 budget bill:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
The way this (and the data uploading with Windows 10) dovetails with the budget spy bill just passed you'd think it was hatched out in a back room - in D.C.. Obviously don't use Windows 10 if possible (you can still get 7 or 8.1 on most systems) and don't use Microsoft's built in encryption option (which Microsoft kneecapped starting with Windows Version 8 by removing the elephant diffusor making it more vulnerable to brute force attacks), there are other options for Windows Encryption.
But you can setup a windows 10 machine with all local accounts and all updates, traffic disabled.
Good guide here http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/07/30/windows-10-privacy-settings/
Looking at wireshark it does seem to work
"I am not a number. I am a free man."
Well, I was a free man until I logged in with my Microsoft account on my Windows 10 PC.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
here's a few ways NSA is intercepting it.
1. all data over the internet is being saved so they nab the key as it's being uploaded plus any other data communicated with Microsoft transparently as you use the net. ; if they want to gain legal authority to use the snoop'd data they go for a warrant and get it 'lawfully' from Microsoft, parallel constructing how their case was built. even if Microsoft encrypts the signal communications between their server and the end-user, the data is nabbed, and most definitely all of the encryption codes for end-user and Microsoft server software is de-decryptable by NSA because NSA has all of Microsoft's encryption certificates and has broken most encryption.
2. alt method is Microsoft just gives them all the encryption certificates secretly even without a warrant.
This has been explained before. Check out the Whistleblowers Websites on the issue.
williambinney.com thomasdrake.xyz russelltice.com drrobertduncan.com
If encryption is turned on by default for normal users, there must be a way for the provider to recover the data.
People lose their passwords all the time, and don't want to lose all their data if that happens. For these people, disk encryption is just a way to prevent regular laptop thieves from accessing their data, not to protect them from the NSA and criminals who can hack Microsoft. They don't want end-to-end encryption.
If you need high level security even against Microsoft, then don't use your MS account, or better yet, don't use Windows.
It means MS has a copy of the keys to your bitlocker encrypted data. And by inference anyone with access to MS, hackers, government, disgruntled employees.. any could log into your computer and use the keys to unlock what you thought was encrypted and safe.
Silence is a state of mime.
While the main point of the article is about a Windows account there is an underlying discussion on overall privacy using Microsoft Windows. This is just the latest article discussing privacy and security concerns. Sure, "some" businesses are always years behind in releasing a new OS. Others are not so far behind, and are very concerned about security so not approving Win10.
For example, as soon as the OS was released we see how the OS will send your keystrokes to Microsoft. Not just what you type into Cortana, IE, or Edge but ALL keystrokes are recorded by the OS. You can disable sending the data to Microsoft, but we have yet to find a way of disabling the keylogger built in to the Kernel. (recorded does not necessarily mean stored long term, but long enough to evaluate in memory.)
Due to that lack of trust, I may have installed Win10 but never created a MS or Azure account. Anything I do on the device is treated as public knowledge because the OS is built to remove privacy from end users. I won't use online banking on the PC with Win10, and logging in to anything is assessed under the assumption that someone from MS and the Government will have full access to the account. When I'm working on sensitive stuff I use Linux.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Yours :P
Thank you Dave Raggett
Should be noted, TrueCrypt 7.1a (last full version) works fine with Windows 10 if you're really concerned about someone thieving your data. I highly doubt the OS has your TrueCrypt keys if you use this solution, Microsoft account or not.
It says "all your base are belong to us".
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This.
If Microsoft was forcing full-disk encryption on Windows 10 Home users (and I'm not convinced that they are), then it's still better than the alternative of having no encryption, right? Someone might argue that it's a "false sense of security" since you really don't know where the recovery keys could have gone, but I seriously doubt that most of these users would even know that they had encryption on anyway, so it can't be a false sense of security if you never knew you had the security in the first place.
And I'm not convinced this is even that widespread. I've installed Win 10 Pro on several machines with the TPM chip enabled from a previous install, and none of them automatically encrypted. In each case, I had to manually turn on Bitlocker. I can't speak for Home installs, but having this "poor man's Bitlocker" seems an upgrade over the "no encryption at all" (or third-party) in 8.1 Home and before. And seriously, how many Home users have actually configured their TPM in the first place?
Speaking as the "family tech support" guy, I'm happy that Microsoft went this route (again, if they did). It ensures that recovery is possible in case of the need to switch the drive to a new machine, without making me have to explain to each of my family members what to do during each install. And really, my advice for these users would be to let Microsoft manage it anyway. I wouldn't trust that they would print out a recovery key and put it in their safe (don't forget labeling it properly to make sure they knew which computer/drive it went with), purchase some storage media (e.g. flash drive) to keep in the safe, or safely store it in some other way. For these HOME users, having the recovery key in their MS account is "good enough", especially when they probably wouldn't have encryption otherwise.
Side note: The fact that there are around 100 replies after the nonsensical question "Can a corporate security officer comment?" goes to show why Slashdot should put back in the "most recent posts first" sort order and have it as the default. This just isn't an issue for corporate use, since they are going to manage Bitlocker recovery keys themselves in AD. And yet then you get a dozen nonsensical replies that, "This is why no company would consider Windows 10."
Why center the discussion around the person who put all of 10 seconds of thought into their "First post" when the better thought out posts will be further down?
Does MS having a copy of a WIndows 10 Pro bitlocker key for a PC in a small medical office violate HIPPA or is the issue moot?
Bitlocker lets you have the option to save your "recovery key" to USB, or to print it. In both cases, you can destroy the key effectively (note that you'll have to take care to ensure that the USB device is physically destroyed or secured in a manner secure against attackers you are concerned about, and that your printer doesn't keep a recoverable copy somewhere).
So Bitlocker is (in theory) safe and secure. Personally, I wouldn't trust this- it's proprietary, it's Microsoft, and there's every motivation to either make the key recoverable or disclose it for uses Microsoft deems useful (for instance, a future tyrannical government might be able to threaten them in such a way as to produce the keys). But by their claims, it should be.
The article distinguishes this from "device encryption", a gimped form of Bitlocker present in the "Home" edition that they give for free (or cheap or whatever- once I did even the first amount of research into Windows 10 I decided to avoid it entirely). If you pay for Professional, you get access to "Bitlocker", which has configuration options, including the print-out and USB options, which can result in NO recovery key- the generally desired state from a security perspective.
The headline of the article truthfully states that Microsoft "probably" has your recovery key, and the slashdot headline leaves that out totally. Both leave out the important fact that you have to be using the "device encryption" version of Bitlocker in the shit-tier version of Windows 10.
There's other posts talking about the keylogger, or kernel keylogging. I'm not sure the fact that the kernel keeps your keystrokes for awhile is inherently vulnerable, but it is suspicious.
In any event, the fact that you must be an expert user to get anything that MIGHT be security out of Windows 10 is absolutely disgusting. The Home version will be the most common by far, and the average user will not be aware of the default settings where keys are sent (along with a ton of other things) upstream, nor will he be aware of the fact that his supposed device encryption is recoverable by any hacker or bad actor in the future. The level of drama required to do anything in Windows 10 is massive. It's a real nightmare.
Anyone notice how oddly hard it is to set up anything but straight AES in almost all places? There's a shocking lack of user exposed options even in Linux (and Linux can be configured to extremely high levels of redundancy or security). Name a distro that lets you full disk encrypt with AES-Twofish-Serpent from a GUI, for instance (again, you can absolutely configure this, but it seems hard to get anything but straight AES). I know AES is trusted, but I'd trust it more if there were ways more ways to opt out of it and use either another block cipher, or it WITH another block cipher.