This week at the Chaos Computer Club's (CCC) annual Chaos Communication Congress, hacker Thomas Lambertz presented 'Windows BitLocker: Screwed without a Screwdriver,' detailing how users can beat BitLocker encryption and gain access to protected data. The old reported-fixed bug, CVE-2023-21563, can still be exploited on current versions of Windows with just one-time physical device access and a network connection. Still, the attack doesn't require opening up the PC or having hours of access as with other drive decryption exploits [h/t Heise].
This attack falls into the category of "bitpixie" attacks that have been well-documented since mid-2022. While this specific error was technically fixed via updates in November 2022, this demonstrates that this fix is, unfortunately, only surface-level. By using Secure Boot to start an outdated Windows bootloader to extract the encryption key into memory and subsequently using Linux to retrieve the contents of memory and find that BitLocker key, the updated version of Windows 11 can still effectively be attacked as if it were never updated to address bitpixie attacks at all.
