this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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Yeah, but normally FDE overhead is so low, you may as well encrypt.
That's one issue I had with this article. It doesn't do any actually tests to compare it to other OS implementations. How can we condemn Microsoft for 45% slower speeds (in a specific benchmark on specific hardware) when there's no context to compare it to? And this claim is specifically only for software encryption where hardware level encryption is not available. Is it Windows 11 that's specifically causing this, or is it a general problem?
Comparing to macOS is actually impossible because fde can’t be turned off on Macs at all. Macs (and iPhones etc.) handle encryption of internal storage transparently in hardware at pretty much no overhead and without the CPU even having access to the key. You can only choose whether a login is required for the Secure Enclave hardware to be able to access the key.
On other platforms it’s pretty much a hardware question too. PC vendors and hard disk vendors could do the same thing Apple is doing regardless of whether the OS is Windows or Linux or whatever. How fast the OS based encryption is only matters on hardware that doesn’t have this functionality.
Exactly right. To me it seems overly clicky baity to specifically condemn Windows 11 for the overhead of software based encryption because the hardware doesn't support it. The same problem exists across all platforms (hypothetically) if there is no hardware support.
It would have been another thing if they could show this problem was unique to Windows 11, or if they focused on the fact that it was difficult to disable. Instead they put so much effort into saying Windows 11 runs 45% slower due to Bitlocker.
What was telling for me was the article from the same site from a few years ago about Microsoft disabling the use of hardware encryption by default because they couldn't trust the drive manufacturers to do it right.
Do they want things to be secure or fast?