Windows 11 encryption error may cause data loss, temporary slowdown on newer PCs

Microsoft has Published a knowledge base article Acknowledging that there is an encryption acceleration issue in the latest versions of Windows that may lead to data corruption. The company recommends installing the June 2022 security updates for Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022 to “prevent further harm,” although there are no suggested solutions for anyone who has already lost data due to the error.

The issues only affect relatively modern computers and servers that support the Vector Advanced Encryption Standard (VAES) instruction to speed up encryption operations. Microsoft says affected systems are using AES-XTS or AES-GCM instructions “on new hardware”. Part of the AVX-512 Instruction SetVAES instructions are supported by Intel’s Ice Lake, Tiger Lake, Rocket Lake, and Alder Lake Architectures – Power some 10th generation CPUs for laptops, as well as all 11th and 12th generation CPUs. AMD’s The upcoming architecture of Zen 4 It also supports VAES, although by the time these chips are released in the fall, the patches will have plenty of time to multiply.

Microsoft says the issue occurred when it added “new code paths” to support updated coding guidelines in simcryptWindows Cryptographic Functions Library. These code paths were added in the initial release of Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022, so the issue should not affect older versions like Windows 10 or Windows Server 2019.

The initial fix for the problem, offered in Windows’ June 2022 security update package (Windows 11 build 22000.778), it will prevent further damage at the expense of reduced performance, indicating that the initial fix was to disable encryption acceleration on these processors entirely. Using disks encrypted with Bitlocker, Transport Layer Security (TLS), or accessing encrypted storage on servers will be slower with the first patch installed, although July 2022 security updates (Windows 11 build 22000.795) should bring performance back to its previous level.