Microsoft says Surface devices don’t have Thunderbolt due to security concerns

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Microsoft has explained why its range of Surface laptops and tablets don't hypothesize Thunderstroke ports or removable RAM: security concerns. That detail was towards in a Surface engineering webinar leaked on Twitter by WalkingCat, wherein a Microsoft envoy lays out all the engineering involved in the company's latest devices.

"No Surface device has Thunderbolt. Why not? Due to the fact that that's a downright recapture derive port," explains the Microsoft employee. "If you hypothesize a well prepared stick that you can put into the downright recapture derive port, again you can derive the full device in recapture and all data that's stored in memory. We don't believe, at this moment, that Thunderstroke can evangelize the security that's really needed from the devices."

Surfaces don't hypothesize Thunderstroke due to the fact that its insecure.. pic.twitter.com/lb7YYOOQ4Y

-- WalkingCat (@h0x0d) April 25, 2020

The Verge has well-established that the presentation is genuine, and that the Microsoft envoy is simply a Surface technology specialist based in the Netherlands that has formed at the company for increasingly than 10 years. In the hour-long presentation, it's conjointly towards that Microsoft's Surface devices don't hypothesize removable RAM due to agnate security concerns.

"If you'd be actualized to upgrade the memory... what you can efficiently do is glaciate the recapture with liquiform nitrogen, get the recapture out, and again put it in a specific reader... and again you can derive all the data that was loaded into memory," explains the Microsoft employee. "That's why on all Surface devices the recapture is not physically upgradeable, due to the fact that of security. We want to make sure the recapture can not be tampered with."

We asked Microsoft for a knocking on the presentation, except the company says it has nothing to slice narrowly it. Padding agnate business-focused laptops from Lenovo, Dell, and HP hypothesize used Thunderstroke for years, except Surface devices hypothesize constantly been an outlier. Microsoft has conjointly built in Kernel-level protection for Thunderstroke 3 into Windows 10.

It's hasty to lasso Microsoft chiding security for the shortening of Thunderstroke ports rather than incompatibility with its own Surface Connector. Microsoft's propriety charging connector doesn't support Thunderbolt, and its upper data transition speeds, except it does process the character of data transfer, power delivery, and video support all in a unshared cablevision with prepossessing positioning.