Microsoft announced that the new version of Windows 11 rolling out to Insiders in the Canary channel comes with increased protection against phishing attacks and support for SHA-3 cryptographic hash functions.

Enhanced Phishing Protection is a Defender SmartScreen feature introduced with the release of Windows 11 22H2 in September 2022 and is designed to protect user credentials against phishing attacks.

Until now, this worked by warning users not to reuse school or work passwords, not to store them in plain text in Notepad or Office documents, and not to enter them on branded sites. as malicious by the anti-phishing and anti-malware SmartScreen Windows Security feature.

While Phishing Protection is enabled by default on Windows 11 22H2 systems, password protection options are disabled but can be enabled from Start > Settings > Privacy & Security > Windows Security > App & browser control > Reputation-based protection settings.

In the “Phishing Protection” section, you can enable the “Warn me about password reuse” and “Warn me about insecure password storage” options.

Starting today, on Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 25324, Insiders will be warned not to copy and paste passwords to unsecured sites and apps.

“Starting with Windows 11, version 22H2, enhanced phishing protection in Microsoft Defender SmartScreen helps protect Microsoft school or work passwords from phishing and insecure use across sites and apps,” said Microsoft’s Amanda Langowski and Brandon LeBlanc. said.

“We are trying a change from this release where users who have Windows security warning options enabled under Application and browser control > Reputation-based protection > Phishing protection will see a warning from the interface user on insecure password copy-paste, just as they currently see when they type in their password.”

This feature will gradually become available to Canarian Channel Insiders as its rollout just started today.

Microsoft also announced support for SHA-3 cryptographic hash functions introduced with this release of Windows 11 Canary through the Windows CNG library.

“Starting with this release, we are adding support for the SHA-3 family of hash functions and SHA-3-derived functions (SHAKE, cSHAKE, KMAC),” Langowski and LeBlanc added.

“The SHA-3 family of algorithms are the latest hash functions standardized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).”

The list of supported functions and algorithms added in the current Windows 11 Insider build includes:

• SHA-3 hash functions: SHA3-256, SHA3-384, SHA3-512 (SHA3-224 is not supported)
• SHA-3 HMAC algorithms: HMAC-SHA3-256, HMAC-SHA3-384, HMAC-SHA3-512
• Algorithms derived from SHA-3: Extensible output functions (XOF) (SHAKE128, SHAKE256), customizable XOF (cSHAKE128, cSHAKE256) and KMAC (KMAC128, KMAC256, KMACXOF128, KMACXOF256).

Earlier this month, Microsoft announced that it would try to enable Local Security Authority (LSA) protection by default And add new USB4 troubleshooting page on devices running recent builds of Windows 11 Insider.