I got ahold of the Copilot+ software.
Recall uses a bunch of services themed CAP - Core AI Platform. Enabled by default.
It spits constant screenshots (the product brands then “snapshots”, but they’re hooked screenshots) into the current user’s AppData as part of image storage.
The NPU processes them and extracts text, into a database file.
The database is SQLite, and you can access it as the user including programmatically. It 100% does not need physical access and can be stolen.
And if you didn’t believe me.. found this on TikTok.
There’s an MSFT employee in the background saying “I don’t know if the team is going to be very happy…”
They should probably be transparent about it, rather than telling BBC News you’d need to be physically at the PC to hack it (not true). Just a thought.
So the code underpinning Copilot+ Recall includes a whole bunch of Azure AI backend code, which has ended up in the Windows OS. It also has a ton of API hooks for user activity monitoring.
Apps themselves can also search and make themselves more searchable.
It opens a lot of attack surface.
The semantic search element is fun.
They really went all in with this and it will have profound negative implications for the safety of people who use Microsoft Windows.
If you want to know where tech companies are with AI safety, know Microsoft Recall won’t record screenshots of DRM’d movies..
..but will record screenshots of your financial records and WhatsApp messages, as corporate interests were prioritised over user safety.
And it’s enabled by default.
Copilot+ Recall feature pop quiz:
You deal with a sensitive matter on my Windows PC. E.g. an email you delete. Does Copilot Recall still store the deleted email?
Answer: yes. There's no feature to delete screenshots of things you delete while using your PC. You would have to remember to go and purge screenshots that Recall makes every few seconds.
If you or a friend use disappearing messages in WhatsApp, Signal etc, it is recorded regardless.
It comes up a lot as people are rightly confused, but if you wonder what problem Microsoft are trying to solve with Recall:
It isn't them being evil, it's business leaders who are middle aged and can't remember what they're doing driving decision making about which problems to solve.
A huge amount of business leaders are dudes who have no idea what the fuck is happening. This leads to the Recall feature.
Microsoft exists in and is driven by that bubble.
Some screenshots of Recall's SQLite database here: https://mastodon.social/@detective/112513529733646088
Just to clarify, I can access it without SYSTEM too. Microsoft are about to set cybersecurity back a decade by empowering cyber criminals via poor AI safety. Feature ships in a few weeks.
The latest Risky Business episode on Recall is good, but one small correction - it doesn’t need SYSTEM rights.
Here’s a video of two MSFT employees gaining access to the Recall database folder - with SQLite database right there. Watch their hacking skills. (You don’t need to go this length as an attacker, either). Cc @riskybusiness
I’m not being hyperbolic when I say this is the dumbest cybersecurity move in a decade. Good luck to my parents safely using their PC.
Stealing everything you’ve ever typed or viewed on your own Windows PC is now possible with two lines of code — inside the Copilot+ Recall disaster.
My look at the feature, FAQs from the community etc
I wrote a piece recently about Copilot+ Recall, a new Microsoft Windows 11 feature which — in the words of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella- takes “screenshots” of your PC constantly, and makes it into an…
this is the out of box experience for Windows 11's new Recall feature on Copilot+ PCs. It's enabled by default during setup and you can't disable it directly here. There is an option to tick "open Settings after setup completes so I can manage my Recall preferences" instead.
HT @tomwarren
You allow BYOD so people can pick up webmail and such. It’s okay, because when they leave you revoke their access, and your MDM removes all business data from the machine ✅
What the employee does: opens Recall, searches their email, files etc and pastes the data elsewhere.
Nothing is removed from Recall, as it is a photographic memory of everything the former employee did.
Security and privacy researchers - You can now install Copilot+ Recall on any ARM hardware (doesn’t need an NPU) or in Azure VMs.
Guide from @detective
The devices launch THIS MONTH to customers so I suggest people look at this.
Recent DHS published report handed to the US President which said it had "identified a series of Microsoft operational and strategic decisions that collectively pointed to a corporate culture that deprioritized enterprise security investments and rigorous risk management"
Microsoft: let’s use AI to screenshot everything users do every 5 seconds, OCR the screenshots, make it searchable and store it in AppData!
If anybody is wondering if you can enable Recall on a machine remotely without Copilot+ hardware support - yep.
I’ve also found a way to disable the tray icon.
I went and looked at YouTube for Recall to get out of the echo chamber and I can only find one positive video. Even the people at the event are slating it, including people with media provided Copilot+ PCs.
There’s some content creators who’ve realised it records their credit cards, so they’re making videos of their cards going walkies.
It’s going to be interesting to see how Microsoft get out of this one. They may have contractual commitments to ship Recall with external parties.
I thought they were risking crashing the Copilot brand with this one, but I was wrong looking at the videos and comments on them - I think they’re crashing the Windows consumer brand.
The reaction to photographic memory of what people do at home has - you’ll be surprised to know - not been seen as a reason to buy a device, but a reason why not to.
Microsoft has been declining to comment on criticism of Recall for a week - but they have apparently told a journalist off the record at Future that changes will be made before Copilot+ devices drop in the coming days.
This may include an attempt to invalidate researcher criticism, we’ll see.
WIRED has a piece about Total Recall, a now released tool which dumps keypresses, text and screenshots (they’re JPEGs) from Microsoft Recall
https://www.wired.com/story/total-recall-windows-recall-ai/
Total Recall software by @xaitax https://github.com/xaitax/TotalRecall
Example search for ‘password’:
🪟 Captured Windows: 133
📸 Images Taken: 36
🔍 Search results for 'password': 22
📄 Summary of the extraction is available in the file:
C:\Users\alex\Downloads\TotalRecall\2024-06-04-13-49_Recall_Extraction\TotalRecall.txt
I hadn’t been aware until today of the external reaction to Recall. Holy shit. Tim Apple must be pleased.
Everything from media coverage to YouTube to TikTok is largely negative. All the comments are negative.
These videos have tens of millions of views and hundreds of thousands of comments.
I knew it would be bad but.. it’s worse. I’ve spent hours looking at the sentiment and.. well, they probably would have got better coverage from launching an NFT of pregnant Clippy.
A key element of Recall is Microsoft say only you can access your Recall, it is per user.
ArsTechnica enabled Recall on Windows 11 box and tested the claim. By logging in as another user they could access the database and screenshots.
If you want to know how Microsoft have got themselves into this giant mess with Recall, here’s what the documentation says between the lines:
you, the customer, are a simpleton who doesn’t want to be an AI genius yet. Have a caveman mode.
Recall and Copilot+ is also coming to ASUS systems, including AMD, in a deal with Microsoft.
ASUS Announces Complete Portfolio of AI-Powered Copilot+ PCs https://www.asus.com/us/news/pnm9tg6qccql6ern/
Nvidia announced they are bringing Copilot+ and Recall to PCs, in a deal with Microsoft: https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/2/24169568/microsoft-copilot-plus-gaming-pc-nvidia-amd
Three Copilot+ Recall questions that keep coming up.
Q. Can you alter the Recall history?
A. Yes. You can change the OCR database and change the screenshots as the logged in user or as software running as the local user. There is no audit log of changes.
Q. Are they snapshots, as Microsoft says, or screenshots?
A. They are just screenshots, jpegs.
Q. What is to stop apps on your machine accessing your Recall covertly?
A. Nothing. There is no audit log of access.
@MalwareJake Recall is a melting pot of everything wrong with modern Windows: Per-user app and settings MSIX app setting virtualization Intune MDM per-user policies WinRT generated proxy code Enabled by default, opt-out If you hate it, it's in there, I tell you
If anybody is wondering what Microsoft's reaction to any of the Copilot+ Recall concerns are, they're continuing to decline comment to every media outlet.
I've seen comments MS staff have been given for enterprise customers, which are nonsense handwaving.
Product ships live on devices from Dell, Lenovo etc this month. https://x.com/zacbowden/status/1798221879741931847
Damn, I really thought the Recall database security would at least be, you know, secure. Turns out Microsoft did pretty much what I blogged about for WindowsApps, except you need to find a specific WIN://SYSAPPID instead. So to bypass the security just get the token for the AIXHost.exe process, then impersonate that and you can access the database, no admin required. Or, as the files are owned by the user, just grant yourself access using icacls etc :D
This tool extracts and displays data from the Recall feature in Windows 11, providing an easy way to access information about your PC's activity snapshots. - xaitax/TotalRecall
You can now remotely dump Recall data and screenshots over the internet from Linux etc. Changes in flight for parsing data too.
Gets all users Recall folders and dumps them, then renames screenshots to include .jpg (unnecessary but helpful). I cherry-picked the download_folder functionality from #320 and then improved it du...
Turns out speaking out works.
Microsoft are making significant changes to Recall, including making it specifically opt in, requiring Windows Hello face scanning to activate and use it, and actually encrypting the database.
There are obviously going to be devils in the details - potentially big ones.
Microsoft needs to commit to not trying to sneak users to enable it in the future, and it needs turning off by default in Group Policy and Intune for enterprise orgs.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/7/24173499/microsoft-windows-recall-response-security-concerns
this is the out of box experience for Windows 11's new Recall feature on Copilot+ PCs. It's enabled by default during setup and you can't disable it directly here. There is an option to tick "open Settings after setup completes so I can manage my Recall preferences" instead.
HT @tomwarren
You allow BYOD so people can pick up webmail and such. It’s okay, because when they leave you revoke their access, and your MDM removes all business data from the machine ✅
What the employee does: opens Recall, searches their email, files etc and pastes the data elsewhere.
Nothing is removed from Recall, as it is a photographic memory of everything the former employee did.
Security and privacy researchers - You can now install Copilot+ Recall on any ARM hardware (doesn’t need an NPU) or in Azure VMs.
Guide from @detective
The devices launch THIS MONTH to customers so I suggest people look at this.
lol I guess that name was inevitable
@GossiTheDog Instead of doing security, they are doing screenshots.
The next time an Azure Master key is stolen is probably by a screenshot 😂
[1] https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2024/05/03/prioritizing-security-above-all-else/
Could we just go back to old way to get Windows updates: Paying for new versions or buying a new system? I'm tired of this "free" approach where everything is fair game to exploit...
@GossiTheDog I'm surprised it took this long.
But will it get my ass to Mars?
There is no possible secure implementation it's built for access. Although I'm relatively immune to conspiracy theories I still think this is seen at a corporate and govt level as a way out of the "we must be able to see everything" without the impossible idiocy of backdooring cryptography.
They've made a front door instead.
Recail will kill the ability for organisations to allow employees or contractors to use their own PCs to connect to any work system, including O365. Only managed devices where Recall has been removed will be trusted. Get ready for an explosion in costs due to this idiocy.
]
When you leave work with a company supplied laptop, IT can log in with admin account and let your boss access all your Recall data of what you have been doing for thr last 6 months on the laptop?
Or
As part of outboardinng / exit interview, you are asked for work laptop password, which is then used with Recall to
Company IT systems configured to "manage" and "safely store this data" ie copied off your machine to a company server. Then used to train company AI to reduce head count.
@GossiTheDog @tomwarren It occurs to me: people are perhaps worried that the natsec issue here is that someone gets a screencap of an email with our nuclear launch codes or something. No, the problem is when someone gets the screenshots of the emails between that person and their paramour from their private PC.
If I were a counterespionage analyst...I would suddenly want to do healthcare policy as the less clusterfucked option.
@GossiTheDog "You're in control of your privacy"
which is why we're literally not giving you any controls over your privacy
@GossiTheDog What a cursed way of handling the OOBE; this is Microsoft's way of being able to inflate the installs of Recall on eligible PCs! Clearly a feature which could harvest sensitive information about a user should be opt-in after weighing the pros and cons of doing so.
My PC is not yet compatible with this feature...I still find myself uneasy about any future changes Microsoft has in store with Copilot. I am edging ever closer to biting the bullet and getting Ubuntu on my rig.
@GossiTheDog @tomwarren
„You are in control of your privacy“
You a free to take a sledgehammer to your device at any time.👆
@GossiTheDog @tomwarren Am I correct in thinking that you can't apply a Group Policy for this until the feature is actually on your machine ?
Certainly the part of the policy space cited for Recall doesn't exist on my up to date Intel/AMD-based Windows 11 Pro 23H2 system.
I can't be the only person wanting to be pre-emptive about disabling this.
@GossiTheDog Geez. Even Apple does not do that in their OOBE wizards.
The funny thing is that I can imagine very good use cases for this, especially for people with selective short-term memory like me.
But with that level of protection... Sorry, nope.
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