Its annoying that a security benefit is being turned off, but it can be turned back on if you are confident it will not break your setup.
I would say it is because they made a big marketing blog post about it at the time[1] (August 2025). So clearly they considered it a significant new feature.
The blog post ended with the words "If we don’t spot any major regressions with 1.86, the next stable release will likely turn on state encryption by default for all new nodes". It was then enabled by default 1.90.2 onwards (October 2025).
That is why I would consider it a significant u-turn.
They wanted to push a feature, and they said they would if they didn't see any major regressions. Then they did see a major regression, so they pulled the feature.
Exact version numbers, timelines, and builds are pretty irrelevant to that process. Or are you actually saying you would prefer they had just left their product broken for a significant portion of users, just to keep aligned with the version numbers they mentioned in a blog post?
Just upgrading your firmware with bitlocker enabled can brick your PC.
Could you elaborate ? Firmware/OS should not affect TPM contents ? Otherwise e.g. TPM-reliant Windows installs would break ?
In addition there are cloud scenarios where your VM has a TPM and you want to e.g .stop a malicious actor poaching your VM and running it elsewhere.
Having the tailscale TPM tied to your cloud hypervisor prevents the "lift and shift" attack.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MSI_Gaming/comments/15w8wgj/psa_tpm...
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/hardware-...
The correct procedure is to unlock the keys, copy them out of the TPM, perform the upgrade, reboot to remeasure the system state, then finally store the keys back into the TPM.
Nobody says "disable disk encryption right away incase the tom forgets the keys". The vast majority of TPM's manage to not forget the keys.
Windows also bit me in the ass with this feature, but tailscale not enabling encryption wouldn't have helped one iota.
The reason it's done this way is to allow multiple methods of accessing the disk, to allow the encryption password to be changed without having to rewrite every single sector of the disk, etc, etc. You can even “erase” the disk in one swift operation by simply erasing all copies of the key.
How many home users have that? How many stories of personal data loss are we going to hear as windows 11 ready PCs start to die?
https://boingboing.net/2026/01/05/everyone-hates-onedrive-mi...
And it relates to Windows and Linux only, and using the TPM.
My guess is that unreliable TPMs made it risky to have this enabled by default.
Yes, just like >= 1.86, you set a flag during install.
But that's not the point.
The point is that >= 1.90.2 it became enabled by default.
The point is that most people would expect that "by default" to be a permanent fixture, i.e. a sane secure-by-default config.
This means that people with automated deployments based on >= 1.90.2 can no longer rely on the "by default" and this now needs to be flagged.
Just a thought.
>Secure node state storage can help protect against a malicious actor copying node state from one device to another, effectively cloning the node. By using platform-specific capabilities, Tailscale ensures node state encrypts at rest, making theft from disk and node cloning more difficult.
Marketing blogpost - https://tailscale.com/blog/encrypting-data-at-rest:
>What we really care about here are those private keys stored in the state file, since those are used to identify your node to the coordination server and to other nodes. We need to protect them from exfiltration.
>If the Tailscale state file is unencrypted, an attacker with that kind of root access could use the file’s contents from a different machine and impersonate your node. From the perspective of the Tailscale coordination server, it’s as if your device switched to a different network and got a new IP address. We call this attack “node cloning”.
The only scenario where it helps is a local attacker who can read the state file on disk, but is not full root. Kinda unlikely on Linux, but could happen on Windows.
That was my point :)
TL;DR If you care about the stuff mentioned in that blog post (which most sensible sysadmins would) then the implication is that you are no longer protected against those threat scenarios UNLESS you manually apply the flag at install time.
Which means for people using deployment scripts/tools you now need to update those to put the flag in during installation. Because previously you could rely on the feature being "on by default", which is no longer the case.
Previously with Tailscale 1.90.2 or later node state storage encrypted by default on all supported platforms.
As of yesterday, per changelog, state file encryption and hardware attestation keys are no longer enabled by default.
This effectively rolls back history to pre 1.90.2 and you will now have to enable it manually like you did during the public beta period (>= 1.86) of this short-lived new feature.