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I’d say that as soon as Windows fully boots up, you have a much larger attack surface anyway, even if you can’t log in due to the account password. Though I can’t point at anything specific off the top of my head.

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Is there anything you could access from the keyboard or touchpad? Seems easy enough to only accept the inputs that the login screen needs and nothing else.

Only DMA comes to mind but it requires a non-hardened configuration which isn't that common on recent laptops + OS.

Very rarely are drivers, including USB drivers, written to assume a hostile device (see e.g. the PS3). Frankly, they rarely seem to be written by people who care about software at all. (I still can’t get over the very first Zenbook, which suffered spontaneous deaths under Linux because the ACPI bytecode in the firmware tried to initialize a nonexistent IDE controller. And people say it’s Linux that has a hardware support problem.) So this is a somewhat valid concern.

But I still can’t get over the idea where the default configuration of BitLocker is completely useless for basically anything except working around storage devices that will lie to you and not erase things you told them to. I just refuse to accept that’s in any way sane.

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