During the pandemic, many users decided to buy a new PC or laptop. Well, now a big bug has been discovered that causes the file corruption in windows 11. The problem jump up in team with Intel Ice Lake, Tiger Lake and Rocket Lake processorsas well as in the AMD Ryzen 5000 series.
According to issue described by Microsoft as KB5017259, Windows 11 user may experience data corruption. It seems that the problem is related to the new data encryption hardware accelerator. It’s not an Intel and AMD issue in fact, it’s an OS issue.
Windows 11 would damage user data
It seems that the the problem would be in the Vector Advanced Encryption Standard (VAES). This is the most recent AES encryption standard and these extensions would be affected by the issue:
- Modified codebook mode based on AES XEX with Ciphertext Stealing (AES-XTS)
- AES with Galois/Counter Mode (GCM) (AES-GCM)
Intel Ice Lake (Xeon processors), Tiger Lake (11th Gen for laptops) and Rocket Lake (11th Gen for desktops) processors and the AMD Ryzen 5000 series would be too modern. The problem would be in the new code paths for Symcrypt library. Because of this, the data written may have errors, so it may be damaged, corrupted or lost.
Microsoft didn’t give much more information about it. They simply state that, to avoid data corruption, install the latest updates. It is mainly requested to install the preview version on May 24 and the security update on June 14.
No information is given on what to do if we have suffered data corruption due to this issue. Just from Microsoft, they recognize the error and nothing else.
The positive is that we shouldn’t have any problems unless we’re using encryption applications such as BitLocker or TLSamong others.
System slowdown fix
If there was anything missing from this story, it’s that Microsoft acknowledges that it could generate “possibly slower performance“. It seems that the first tests that have been done by some users indicate that the encryption time is doubled, which is quite annoying. This mainly affects hard disk performance, which is reduced due to adjustments in library paths.
For those noticing a significant performance hit, there are workarounds that mitigate the impact somewhat. The The June 23 and July 12 updates seem to alleviate the performance loss a bit. However, future updates may fix most of the performance hits, as this appears to be a hastily released patch.
For anyone who has Windows 11 and one of the mentioned processors, the only thing left is to upgrade or downgrade to Windows 10. If you don’t use encryption apps like the ones mentioned, in principle , you shouldn’t have noticed the problem. In any case, this is a fairly significant breach on the part of Microsoft which, as we can see, has given as little information as possible about it.