Windows 8.1 will encrypt hard drives by default.

Irrelevant post! Who cares what Microsoft offers in the way of security.
They not only offer the NSA a backdoor to everything they produce, but also give it the code for their patches before they are announced to the public every other Tuesday.

 

It the disk is encrypted, is it possible to create and restore backup images?

 

If your laptop gets stolen, it will probably be by some thug who wants your bank account PIN, not by the NSA. So yeah, still relevant to a lot of people. Actually I'd say it's a very smart move.

The one thing I worry about is how this will affect data integrity in the event of a power failure...

 

In my Truecrypt FDE experience, cold imaging (booting outside of system drive) works best but compression won't function. Hot imaging only works if the restore happens after the TrueCrypt bootloader decrypts the drive, and is unencrypted.

 

I always thought encrypting hard drives reduced performance. I've always avoided encrypting hard drives due to horror stories of corrupted drives etc.
Im fine with encrypted vaults.

 

Not noticeably with AES-NI, even on a SSD. Backup and recovery is more difficult, but hardly impossible as long as you don't experience amnesia.

 

Weird 8.1 has been out over a month?

This is the 1st I've heard hard drives are encrypted by default.

If this is true I'd think there'd be about a million calls to MS CSR complaining about borked OSs.

 

Whoaa! A Microsoft Encryption Tool? Now THAT must be trust-able!

No thanks, I'm staying with the Linux Kernel dm-crypt + LUKS.

 

TPM and secureboot has to be presented/enabled in order for this feature to work.
I think currently >90% of windows PCs do not have TPM module, therefore your drive is not encrypted by windows 8.1/

 

Thank you. Now this makes sense.

 

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module

 

It appears the implementation of TPM will surely be a major privacy concern.

 

When these become the only hardware available, the older user controlled hardware will become a rare and valuable commodity.

 

Rare, certainly. Valuable? Nope.

Windows 8.1 has a number of decent security improvements. This is a particularly cool one, though.

 

Imo this will add hardware based back doors. So even the average Linux user won't be safe from 3 letter agencies.

 

Microsoft's credibility is shot, dead, null, irrecoverable, ... Take Skype, for example.

What's the rationale for trusting their encryption?

The most likely application would be locking you out after freezing your data as evidence

 

Nowadays ppl's privacy is being raped by every god damned software vendors day by day: email providers, OS vendors and cloud storage providers. Now we are going to be fuxxed by hardware vendors as well in near future. How wonderful!
P.S., so called security at the cost of one's privacy is a big no no to me.

 

They have a different perspective. Our privacy is a major security hole for them

 

According to the article:

"recovery keys are sent to Microsoft’s servers for safe keeping"

 

Great thanks for the heads up. I will keep looking it up during every installation of Windows 8.1 and I will make sure, it will be always disabled.

 

So anybody that installed Windows 8 in MBR mode and/or in UEFI with secure boot not enabled wouldn't have their data encrypted correct? My $325 video card is not UEFI compatible so I couldn't use Secure Boot. On my 2nd Windows install I went a MBR install.

 

Backdoor in hardware is not that big of a problem. Linux software will most likely have software in place to block or mitigate any issues, such as key scrambling programs now scrambling at a keyboard level.

 

Exactly. They're more concerned about securing their control over the industry, controlling their customers, and dictating requirements to the hardware vendors to exclude potential competitors. I trust my own security package a lot more than I trust their "Trusted_Platform_Module", secure boot, or their half implemented alphabet soup, TPM, ASLR, DEP, IYL.
I'm waiting for this to become a national security issue in order to force the latest spyware down users throats. If XP doesn't die fast enough to suit them, it will happen.

 

Taken together, plus what we know about Microsoft's close cooperation with the NSA, I can't imagine how any non-US government or corporation would use Windows 8 with secure boot.

What was Microsoft thinking? I wonder if they realized that they would be driving away all non-US business.

Edit: See https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?p=2292595&postcount=822