Nishant Chaudhary
Microsoft has recently warned users operating the Windows 11 and Windows server 2022 on the new processors. According to the company, there might be a chance that their data maybe damaged. The official statement from the company read “Windows devices that support the newest Vector Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) (VAES) instruction set might be susceptible to data damage”.
Although the latest news from Microsoft has been positive. They have fixed the bug using the software patches on May 24 and June 14. But there is no information on how these bugs actually effect the data. Plus, we are also not sure on how can one recognize that they have been affected. Only things that is known for sure at this point is that devices with AES-XTS or AES-GCM cipher modes are affected.
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Details about patches
The drawback of these patches or fixes is that they slow down the endpoints. The speed of the AES operations goes down by half or even more after the patch is applied.
Apparently, BitLocker, Transport Layer Security (TLS) (specifically load balancers), and disk throughput (for enterprise customers, mostly) are most affected. According to the reports available the most at-risk operation are related to load balancers like Transport Layer Security and Bitlocker.
Microsoft further elaborated on the issue “We added new code paths to the Windows 11 (original release) and Windows Server 2022 versions of SymCrypt to take advantage of VAES (vectorized AES) instructions, SymCrypt is the core cryptographic library in Windows. These instructions act on Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) registers for hardware with the newest supported processors.”
If you are affected by the endpoint slowdown then you should go for the June 23 preview update. Or the July 12 security update for Window 11 and Windows server 2022. This is the remedy that Microsoft suggested in their official statement.
“If this affects you, we strongly urge you to install the May 24, 2022 preview release or the June 14, 2022 security release, as soon as possible, to prevent further damage”
Looking at the growing cases of data theft or damage, experts recommend that regular backs be made of the data and checked regularly too. You know what they say – “Prevention is better than cure. “
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