“TotalRecall Reloaded” Tool Finds a Side Entrance to the Windows 11 Recall Database
Freeman writes:
Two years ago, Microsoft launched its first wave of "Copilot+" Windows PCs with a handful of exclusive features that could take advantage of the neural processing unit (NPU) hardware being built into newer laptop processors.
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One of the first Copilot+ features was Recall,
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Recall was neither private nor secure; the feature stored its screenshots plus a giant database of all user activity in totally unencrypted files on the user's disk, making it trivial for anyone with remote or local access to grab days, weeks, or even months of sensitive data, depending on the age of the user's Recall database.After journalists and security researchers discovered and detailed these flaws, Microsoft delayed the Recall rollout by almost a year and substantially overhauled its security. All locally stored data would now be encrypted and viewable only with Windows Hello authentication
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The reconstituted Recall was a big improvement, but having a feature that records the vast majority of your PC usage is still a security and privacy risk.
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The problem, as detailed by Hagenah on the TotalRecall GitHub page, isn't with the security around the Recall database, which he calls "rock solid." The problem is that, once the user has authenticated, the system passes Recall data to another system process called AIXHost.exe, and that process doesn't benefit from the same security protections as the rest of Recall.
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Once authenticated, Hagenah says the TotalRecall Reloaded tool can access both new information recorded to the Recall database as well as data Recall has previously recorded.
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Hagenah originally reported his findings to Microsoft's Security Response Center on March 6, and Microsoft officially classified it as "not a vulnerability" on April 3."We appreciate Alexander Hagenah for identifying and responsibly reporting this issue. After careful investigation, we determined that the access patterns demonstrated are consistent with intended protections and existing controls, and do not represent a bypass of a security boundary or unauthorized access to data," a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars. "The authorization period has a timeout and anti-hammering protection that limit the impact of malicious queries."
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The Signal Messenger app on Windows forces Recall to ignore it by default, using a flag that's normally intended to keep DRM-protected content out of the Recall database. The AdGuard ad blocker, the Brave browser, and others have implemented similar workarounds.
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