Dale previously blogged about Peter Gutmann’s whitepaper on Vista. Peter’s paper is constantly updated with information regarding Vista and it’s new “features”.

I was wondering if Microsoft would answer to Peter’s whitepaper and maybe comment or correct him on any misnomers. Some of the Microsoft Vista Development team decided to fill in the blanks and do a Vista Q&A post two weeks ago and a entire podcast (#77) was contributed to it by SecurityNow.

Most of both the Q&A and podcast are discussing DRM in regards to HD content (i.e. premium content), but the podcast continues to discuss more on the drivers and the recovation process. Additionally it explains how most people will just trade keys to get around the protection and how it can easily be bypassed.

What I don’t understand is why something so easily bypassed took five years to develop, hardware vendors now have to comply and end up charging the consumer more money. </rant>

To my understanding from talking to a few friends at Microsoft, drivers won’t nearly be as big of a problem as everyone thinks and a driver development package is already available on MSDN. A MSDN Blog further explains the UMDF driver signing here and seems to have a lot of information about UMDF drivers in general.

Hopefully the driver problem(s) (and possible DoS features) will be (re)solved by the time SCADA entities are forced to upgrade.