14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has released an out-of-band update whose purpose is specifically to correct the TLS and SSL bug that was confirmed on all Windows versions earlier this week.
Oddly enough, Microsoft hasn’t updated the Windows Health dashboard to reveal that a fix is now live, with the company still claiming that a full patch would go live in late October.
The new update that is now live on Windows 11 devices is KB5020387, and it increases the OS build number to 22000.1100 on Windows 11 version 21H2 (this is the only version getting the patch, but most likely, the other releases would receive the same fix in the coming days).
The official KB page comes with just one mention – the patch for the SSL and TLS bug.
“We address an issue that might affect some types of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) connections. These connections might have handshake failures. For developers, the affected connections are likely to receive one or more records followed by a partial record with a size of less than 5 bytes within a single input buffer. If the connection fails, your app will receive the error, “SEC_E_ILLEGAL_MESSAGE,” Microsoft explains.
Worth knowing is that the update isn’t yet available on Windows Update, so users running Windows 11 version 21H2 on their devices need to download it manually from the Microsoft Update Catalog. More information on the available download options is included on the page linked above.
The good news is that Microsoft isn’t aware of any other known issues that might be related to this update, so installing it shouldn’t produce other problems on your device.
As said, the other Windows versions affected by the glitch (keep in mind that all supported versions of Windows are impacted) should get the fix sooner rather than later.