April 2018 update broke Chrome browser (Cryptographic Services bug)

Anonymous
2018-08-13T22:50:55+00:00

I updated to the April 2018 version of Win10 a couple months ago. It caused several issues and broke my Chrome browser completely, so I reverted back to the old version. But Microsoft forced another update on me, so I need this issue fixed somehow.

All the googling I've done says Microsoft has "fixed" this issue with the April update breaking Chrome, but I've installed all patches and they clearly haven't, not in my case. Pages simply refuse to load and time out.

I've narrowed the issue down to the "Cryptographic Services" service. If I stop the service, all of the Chrome pages instantly load and I have no issues for about an hour. It seems to be some sort of issue with certificates/SSL.

The problem is the service keeps restarting itself. I've tried setting it to "disabled," tried unchecking the service in System Configuration, nothing works. It always comes back and Chrome breaks. I'm sure there's good reason to keep it running but I'm not going to let Microsoft force me out of my favorite browser/bookmarks/extensions/etc. like this, and I can't keep stopping a service every hour just to browse the web.

So I need a solution please. And something specifically related to fixing the issue with Cryptographic Services preventing SSL on Chrome. I've done all the basic stuff like reinstalling Chrome, checking firewall settings, etc..

Windows for home | Windows 10 | Internet and connectivity

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  1. Anonymous
    2019-04-04T19:18:13+00:00

    Zeeshan:

    See Peter Nover's 10/1/18 HKCU ...Root regedit delete solution on page1 or my similar solution 12/17/18 page2

    AFAIK: the regedit repair is the only solution, although a proxy might work too.  How did you configure your proxy?  A screenshot would be nice.

    As you mentioned, it is very difficult to stop CryptSvc.  It is called in many places and will autoStart.

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  2. Anonymous
    2019-04-04T05:38:41+00:00

    I have read similar solutions from other google and microsoft geeks but no use. Just to clear something,

    Only Chrome is affected. I can easily do the job on IE or Edge.

    If I type any URL in chrome and press windows key, the page proceed from "establishing secure connection".

    I have disabled/uninstalled all the extensions and plugins(NO USE)

    I have tried Incognito (NO USE)

    Cleared browser cache (NO USE)

    In short!! bla bla bla no use. (NO USE)

    BTW, I am facing this issue since many months but could not find the reason. Since I was not up for installing fresh windows, I did a workaround and install a proxy. With it, my browsing issue was resolved. Recently, through research,  I found that the cryptographic service is the culprit. After stopping it, the issue totally vanishes but the service starts itself after some time even if I disable it and set it to manual.

    In my honest opinion, cryptographic services dependencies got affected somehow and it is causing this issue. If we can identify way to repair the service and its dependencies, we can resolve this permanently.

    Regards

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-04-02T08:27:49+00:00

    Awesome, Works perfectly!!!

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  4. Anonymous
    2019-03-29T03:01:33+00:00

    Larry,

    Thanks once again for the information.  This makes more sense now.  I appreciate the help.

    Nick

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  5. Anonymous
    2019-03-25T01:52:17+00:00

    Nick: While CryptSvc is a key security service, the impact of this particular PR:Certificates is minor.

    The HKCU...SystemCertificates\Root is one of several certificate stores used by Windows, each used for one of the various control levels Windows provides, like machine, user, process, etc.  Access control and trust is a multilayered architecture.  For example, from the PowerShell ISE (console) do:

      Get-ExecutionPolicy -list

    to see the scope levels:

            Scope ExecutionPolicy

            ----- ---------------

    MachinePolicy     Undefined

       UserPolicy        Undefined

          Process         Undefined

      CurrentUser      Unrestricted

     LocalMachine     Restricted

    The HKCU...PR:Certificates list is only used if the current user (yourself) has added Root Certificate Authorities (CA), which in your case is none.  In regedit, if you right-click Root, you'll see a Go to HKLM link, which is one of the other CA stores.

    When Chrome tries to access a site, it polls all the CA store levels to see if they're healthy - regardless of whether they contain any certs.  It's this health check of the lowest level for CurrentUser that loops because of the HKCU permissions damage (and recovery attempts).

    I don't have any specs for the PR:certificates value.  I can only report what I see.  I would assume the middle 16 bytes are part of the healthcheck and may include a timestamp or some other hash to verify health.

    I don't have a damaged system to experiment with.  Since the rebuilt PR:Certificates value worked, I didn't look into it further.

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