BitLocker software encryption slows performance. Here's how to fix it.
Tested: Windows 11 Pro’s On-By-Default Encryption Slows SSDs Up to 45%::Windows 11 Pro defaults to BitLocker being turned on, using software encryption. We’ve tested the Samsung 990 Pro with hardware encryption to show how the various modes impact performance, and how muc
Deliberately using software encryption mode is slow; no shocker there. Their same testing showed no significant difference when hardware encryption mode was used.
It’s SSD dependent and implementation quality may vary between manufacturers and models. Some may not actually protect your data all that well from someone trying to access your data, hence Microsoft defaulting to software they know works.
Those people were actually worse off than anticipated because Microsoft set up BitLocker to leave these self-encrypting drives to their own devices. This was supposed to help with performance–the drives could use their own hardware to encrypt their contents rather than using the CPU–without compromising the drive’s security. Now it seems the company will no longer trust SSD manufacturers to keep their customers safe by themselves.
Researchers at Radboud University in the Netherlands have revealed today vulnerabilities in some solid-state drives (SSDs) that allow an attacker to bypass the disk encryption feature and access the local data without knowing the user-chosen disk encryption password.
The vulnerabilities only affect SSD models that support hardware-based encryption, where the disk encryption operations are carried out via a local built-in chip, separate from the main CPU.
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Deliberately using software encryption mode is slow; no shocker there. Their same testing showed no significant difference when hardware encryption mode was used.
How does one use hardware encryption? Is that a feature that is ssd dependent?
It’s SSD dependent and implementation quality may vary between manufacturers and models. Some may not actually protect your data all that well from someone trying to access your data, hence Microsoft defaulting to software they know works.
There’s a reason they default to software though, the hardware can’t be trusted:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/bitlocker-encrypts-self-encrypting-ssds,40504.html
Linked from that article:
https://www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/flaws-in-self-encrypting-ssds-let-attackers-bypass-disk-encryption/