How to Enable or Disable Secure Boot and TPM Support in VirtualBox 7.0

VirtualBox released version 7.0 in October 2022. It is the first hypervisor to support the emulation of TPM chips along with all the other system components. VirtualBox also offers a Secure Boot feature in EFI mode for virtual machines. The main reason behind these two features was Microsoft’s list of elaborate system requirements for Windows 11.

Without emulation of the TPM 2.0 chip, users couldn’t install Windows 11 on a virtual machine. But with VirtualBox 7.0 it is possible to enable Secure Boot and TPM for any Windows virtual machine. This post will elaborate on the methods to enable or disable TPM and Secure Boot for any VirtualBox virtual machine.

Why Does Windows 11 Need TPM and Secure Boot?

Windows 11 needs both a TPM chip and Secure Boot to offer robust protection against threats and not allow any malware to run when the system boots up. Secure Boot only allows signed drivers to load and the TPM chip helps in BitLocker drive data protection. So, both these features are pretty important from a security standpoint. Check out our guide onwhat Secure Boot is and how it works for more information.

While Windows 11 can work without Secure Boot and a TPM 2.0 chip, it won’t be able to offer that extra layer of system protection it would do otherwise. Many features like Core-isolation, Data Encryption won’t work. If you want to enable or disable these features for Windows 10 or 11 virtual machines, you can do so in VirtualBox 7.0.

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