This week, there was some important news related to BitLocker. The company failed to deliver on its promise to automatically fix “0x80070643 – ERROR_INSTALL_FAILURE” messages when trying to install WinRE updates that fix BitLocker encryption vulnerabilities.
On the flip side, there is also good news as the company has finally confirmed that it has fixed a BitLocker reporting error “65000” that mainly affected Intune. And it looks like we have more BitLocker news to follow.
German news channel Deskmodder reports that the next major version of Windows 11, 24H2, also called the 2024 update, may turn on BitLocker by default during installation, and this is apparently happening in several editions of Windows 11, including Home.
The site noticed the change when running the Windows 11 24H2 installation using the newly redesigned installation that we saw back in January. Fortunately, there is an option to disable Device encryption Inside privacy and security in the settings.
In the report, Deskmodder wrote her observation (Google translated to English):
Windows 11 24H2 comes with a revised setup. The new installation does not start with the “blue windows”, but is similar to inplace. But what can happen during a fresh install is that the drives can be encrypted with Bitlocker in the background.
This affects not only Windows 11 24H2 Pro and above, as some suspect, but also Windows 11 Home.
Encrypting drives with BitLocker isn’t new to the Windows 11 PC landscape. Some OEMs are already doing it on Pro machines, though this time, as the report suggests, the option will likely be on the Home edition as well.
Interestingly, the default software-based BitLocker encryption (XTS-AES 128) in Windows was found to lead to significant performance loss even on some of the fastest data drives, such as PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSDs.
And worse, an unsuspecting user may completely miss the fact that their device is encrypted and recovering the encrypted data can be problematic if the developer doesn’t catch on. or not stored properly.
source: Deskmodder