How BitLocker PINs help protect your data and devices

BitLocker has been under increased public scrutiny in recent months, as vulnerabilities like YellowKey made headlines. By using the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE), YellowKey was able to bypass certain BitLocker configurations, potentially decrypting drives that should have been protected. While this issue was quickly patched, the severity of this finding left many concerned about the security of BitLocker.

What is often missed in discussions around YellowKey is that it is not a new type of vulnerability; bugs in WinRE have been used to bypass BitLocker for years. Preventing these sorts of attacks is one of the reasons why NCSC guidance has always encouraged using a BitLocker PIN. Despite the hyperbolic descriptions of YellowKey’s author likening it to a backdoor, Microsoft has been very public about this. In 2025, Microsoft found and patched four very similar bugs, presenting them at the security conference BlackHat along with a blog explaining how these vulnerabilities work and how to protect against them. If I were trying to hide something, that’s certainly not how I’d start.

The NCSC guidance recommends configuring BitLocker to require a PIN, which mitigates the YellowKey vulnerability. The underlying question, though, is why do attacks like this keep happening? If WinRE is such a threat to BitLocker, why hasn’t it been fixed?

The answer is that this problem is as much about conflicting design principles as it is about individual bugs. WinRE exists to ensure that you can retrieve your data even if something goes wrong. To do this, BitLocker deliberately does not encrypt the files associated with WinRE (because an issue with BitLocker might be the reason you need to recover data). This absence of encryption leaves a gap that can be used by exploits such as YellowKey, and as long as that design decision remains in place, vulnerabilities like YellowKey will continue to be found.

This is why configuring BitLocker to require a PIN is so crucial. Requiring a user to authenticate before using WinRE helps to protect an element of Windows that is uniquely exploitable. In this respect, using BitLocker without a PIN will always be a half measure; it is only a matter of time before new vulnerabilities are discovered in an operating system as large as Windows. YellowKey was not the first time WinRE was used to bypass BitLocker, and it will not be the last.

Source: UK NCSC (Cyber) (13 August 2026)