Yellow Key: BitLocker has been Broken! Don't lose your laptop!

A newly disclosed BitLocker bypass called Yellow Key, released on May 12th by Nightmare/Chaotic Eclipse, allows attackers with brief physical access to unlock BitLocker-encrypted volumes on Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022/2025 without a password, recovery key, or TPM sniffing. The exploit abuses the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) transaction repair handling in the FSTX folder, tricking WinRE into mounting BitLocker-protected volumes as read-write during a recovery flow. A proof of concept is already on GitHub. Default TPM-only BitLocker configurations are silently vulnerable because the convenience unlock mechanism is exactly what the exploit rides. Windows 10 is reportedly not affected. Active exploitation has already been claimed.