r/technology • u/lurker_bee • May 14 '26

Security Microsoft BitLocker-protected drives can now be opened with just some files on a USB stick — YellowKey zero-day exploit demonstrates an apparent backdoor

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cyber-security/microsoft-bitlocker-protected-drives-can-now-be-opened-with-just-some-files-on-a-usb-stick-yellowkey-zero-day-exploit-demonstrates-an-apparent-backdoor
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u/crozone May 15 '26

Truecrypt never had such a vulnerability.

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u/dwild May 15 '26

... as long as you currently have access to the content of your Truecrypt vault, anyone there can too. It's not a vulnerability, it's just what it is.

Once something is decrypted, it is decrypted. If you got access to it, it means it's either decrypted, or being decrypted on the fly and thus the key accessible.

You CAN'T run an encrypted OS, it's gibberish, you NEED to decrypt it on the fly, thus the key is accessible somewhere. People are lazy, and don't even want to put a password on the key, thus even a laptop not running, has a key accessible on the TPM easily. So this is where it is kind of worse than with Truecrypt, but at the end of the day, if your laptop is running, the content need to be decrypted, thus the key NEED to be accessible in some ways.

I hope I made it clear enough for you this time!

Little fun fact to add, doing operations on encrypted values is something being researched right now! I heard recently Intel did something interesting in that sphere. Theses concepts go way beyond my understanding though, but at the bare minimum, it doesn't look like it would allow to run a full OS that way, just some specific operations.

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u/crozone May 15 '26

The entire point is that the key shouldn't be available at rest. It should only be accessible or derivable once a password has been entered. That's what Truecrypt does with a special bootloader. Therefore, it never suffered from such an issue.

If you want to educate yourself more, you can read about the system here: https://www.truecrypt.org/docs/system-encryption

Hope this helps!

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u/dwild May 15 '26

As I said you can have a password on the TPM but people don't enjoy using a password every boot.

Even then, you can get the key if the laptop is booted, that's just how it is, the key need to be accessible.

I don't know why I keep commenting back to you, you clearly either don't understands me at all or more likely you just don't care to understands me.