Microsoft Doesn’t Believe Thunderbolt Is Secure Enough For Its Computers

These days, we’re starting to see more computers come with Thunderbolt 3 ports. This comes on the heels of computer makers ditching more traditional ports in favor of USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 which are interchangeable and use the same cable. However, if there is one company that is sitting out on this, it would be Microsoft.

So why the hesitation? Microsoft has yet to give an official reason why, but a recent tweet by WalkingCat which has subsequently been verified by The Verge has revealed that during an internal presentation, a Microsoft employee was recorded as saying that this is because they don’t believe Thunderbolt is secure enough.

According to the Microsoft employee, “If you’d be able to upgrade the memory… what you can easily do is freeze the memory with liquid nitrogen, get the memory out, and then put it in a specific reader… and then you can access all the data that was loaded into memory. That’s why on all Surface devices the memory is not physically upgradeable, because of security. We want to make sure the memory can not be tampered with.”

https://twitter.com/h0x0d/status/1253917701719769088

Like we said, other companies such as Apple have long adopted the use of Thunderbolt 3, making Microsoft one of the outliers. The company declined to comment on the video, so if you were hoping to see a Microsoft Surface computer with a Thunderbolt port anytime soon, you might not want to get your hopes up.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Computers
Tags: Microsoft, Security