Entire house of Windows 10 and Windows 7 machines experiencing CTL/SSL issues after update

Tadgh · May 27, 2018

Hi guys,

I've come across a problem that's driving me absolutely crazy. Coming here as my next option is to reinstall windows on all 5 windows PCs in the house, which would be bad.

Following a large update on all machines last Thursday every machine in the house has pretty much lost the ability to connect to https domains in any browser, including embedded browsers.

In Firefox the connection hangs on: "Performing a TLS Handshake with..."
In Chrome the connection hangs on: "Establishing a secure connection..."
Discord will often receive messages, but be unable to link to a voice channel or make a call
Spotify will appear to be offline when started but stream music if I can get as far as my library, although it won't show album art
Peer to Peer applications work perfectly, including Deluge and Steam (the steam store, embedded browser, workshop, etc all don't work)
Pinging 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1 both work as expected
These problems are mirrored (although, oddly, to different severities) across all of the PCs in the house

This blog post from Microsoft's Directory Services Escalation Team talks describes the general symptoms I've been having:

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/askds/2018/04/10/tls-handshake-errors-and-connection-timeouts-maybe-its-the-ctl-engine/

But having followed the suggested regedit changes nothing changes.

I've ran a renew, a refresh, and a flush. Nada.

I've tried automatic DNS selection, as well as using Google and OpenDNS, and that doesn't affect the issue.

I've run a Netalyzer, here are the results:

http://n1.netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/summary/id=369839a0-22440-5bc3d0b8-e0d9-4f45-b60a

I don't know exactly what to make of the results, we're really reaching the end of my networking know-how here. Any help is seriously appreciated. We've called our ISP and spoken at length to their techs who can't figure it out either. We've factory reset our router, gotten a new one sent over, factory reset THAT router. I'm convinced it's a problem with an update to how windows security certification works because it started immediately after the update on all machines, and ANY other operating system (linux distros, android, OSX, shitty smart TV OS) all work normally.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

AvocadosGuac · May 28, 2018

Are you running DHCP on a device other than the ISP provided router? Could be an issue with that. Could also be an issue with the network driver not liking that update. See if they are the same.