An error occurred during Service Master Key decryption

Question

I am relatively new to SQL so will try explain as best I can.

All servers are SQL Server 2012

I currently have a database which has two Linked Servers to access two other databases. From these 3 databases I have setup 5 view which are referenced in a stored procedure.

When trying to run the stored procedure it was failing, I opened the procedure and tried to run it manually to see what the issue was and received the below error:

Msg 33094, Level 16, State 1, Line 16
An error occurred during Service Master Key decryption

I then tried breaking it down and found that I was receiving this error when trying to reference the views that where using the Linked Servers.

I tried simple selecting the top 1000 rows of these views and strangely enough it will return the values 1 out of 5 times and give the above error the rest of the time.

I've tried Googling the issue but a lot of the issue are referenced when a database has been restored or moved, nothing of the sort has happened with mine.

it was suggested to run the below to see if there was an error and I've had none.

ALTER SERVICE MASTER KEY REGENERATE

• edit: I've also created a new accounts and relinked both servers in an attempt to test/fix the issue. The accounts are SQL Server Authenticated accounts with db_datareader rights to the databases

Can anyone suggest what I should perhaps look at, I'm a little lost.

Thanks in advance for any help or advice.

Answer 1

We have the same setup and had exactly the same problem on some of our servers and we narrowed it down to a recent Windows patch, KB3004375 (" Update to improve Windows command-line auditing "). After removing this security patch, there are no more errors.

I can elaborate more if needed.