Your Encrypted Data Can Get Corrupted If You Use Windows 11 With Modern CPUs
By The data encryption feature of Windows 11 is apparently not good friends with the VAES instructions of modern CPUs.
Key Points:
- You can suffer from encrypted data corruption if you use Windows 11 with any modern CPU having VAES (Vector Advanced Encryption System) instructions.
- This includes most 10th Generation Intel core CPUs and AMD Ryzen 5000 and higher CPUs.
- Microsoft commented that this happens due to an issue with a faulty Windows 11 BIOS code, not the CPUs.
Microsoft recently announced in a statement that Windows 11 users might suffer from corruption of encrypted data. This is most likely to happen for users who have PCs with modern CPUs.
According to the statement posted on Microsoft’s official website, this is an issue that arises due to faulty codes. There is nothing wrong with the hardware. This happens due to a fault in the coding of VAES or Vector Advanced Encryption System instructions. It is more likely to cause “data damage” to Windows 11 PCs that are connected to Windows Server 2022.
This corruption was first seen in the data of BitLocker, the full volume encryption feature of Windows PCs. BitLocker makes use of two different VAES instructions. One is the AES-XEX tweaked codebook mode that supports ciphertext stealing (AES-XTS). The other one is the AES which supports Galois/Counter Mode (AES-GCM).
However, the good news is that this issue has been parched out in the latest update. Therefore, Windows 11 users are requested to update their OS to the latest update that got rolled out on 23rd July 2022.
This patch introduced the new Windows Server 2022 versions of SymCrypt that will be used in conjunction with the VAES extensions (AVX) instead of AES.
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