I'm surprised Microsoft hasn't implemented AES-XTS with REFS in Windows 10. Okay, that was perhaps an acronym too far. REFS is Microsoft's answer to the new ge

I'm surprised Microsoft hasn't implemented AES-XTS with REFS in Windows 10. Okay, that was perhaps an acronym too far. REFS is Microsoft's answer to the new generation of copy-on-write filesystems, akin to ZFS and BTRFS. It checksums all data on disk to verify integrity. AES-XTS is a block cipher mode that avoids many of the problems of AES-CBC, although neither is as bad as EBC. But like all block cipher modes used for FDE, they're susceptible to malleability attacks. That's because there's just no room in a sector to store authentication information. Enter: a filesystem that performs checksumming and performs authentication at a higher level. It's a little disappointing to me that Bitlocker was weakened and, from the outside, it appears no significant effort was undertaken to resolve this using tech Microsoft already has. The weak link may be some NTFS features that REFS doesn't implement, as currently Microsoft doesn't support using REFS for your system drive.