Vista security spec 'longest suicide note in history'?

[ChrisP]

Because it's a doozy to find on the homepage here's a direct link to article : http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt

It should be noted that : "But this isn't just a typical anti-Microsoft rant. Gutmann's report runs to 6,000 words and contains hardly any FSF-style juvenile invective. (FSF = Free Software Foundation, famous anti-MS peoples)."

Picked this up from slashdot. http://it.slashdot.org/it/06/12/25/2034238.shtml.

Peter Gutmann is a member of the Auckland University (NZ) Department of Computer Science.

This document looks purely at the cost of the technical portions of Vista's
content protection. The political issues (under the heading of DRM) have been
examined in exhaustive detail elsewhere and won't be commented on further,
unless it's relevant to the cost analysis. However, one important point that
must be kept in mind when reading this document is that in order to work,
Vista's content protection must be able to violate the laws of physics,
something that's unlikely to happen no matter how much the content industry
wishes it were possible. This conundrum is displayed over and over again in
the Windows content-protection specs, with manufacturers being given no hard-
and-fast guidelines but instead being instructed that they need to display as
much dedication as possible to the party line. The documentation is peppered
with sentences like:

"It is recommended that a graphics manufacturer go beyond the strict letter
of the specification and provide additional content-protection features,
because this demonstrates their strong intent to protect premium content".

This is an exceedingly strange way to write technical specifications, but is
dictated by the fact that what the spec is trying to achieve is fundamentally
impossible. Readers should keep this requirement to display appropriate
levels of dedication in mind when reading the following analysis [Note A].

I'm sorry? What? You're asking a third party hardware manufacturer of my Gaming Video card to put Copy protection in my VIDEO CARD???

Someone shoot Microsoft in the OTHER foot... symmetry always looked better to me.

The whole article is 6000 words so I'll summarise when I get the chance, to save the untechincally interested time and effort.

 

[ChrisP]

Oh I love this bit...

"In order to prevent tampering with in-system communications, all communication
flows have to be encrypted and/or authenticated. For example content to video
cards has to be encrypted with AES-128. This requirement for cryptography
extends beyond basic content encryption to encompass not just data flowing
over various buses but also command and control data flowing between software
components. For example communications between user-mode and kernel-mode
components are authenticated with OMAC message authentication-code tags, at
considerable cost to both ends of the connection."
In short... any data moving around between bits of hardware and even between software on your computer is going to have encryption... making it slow, and using up more of your computing power.... Why?

 

[ChrisP]

"Note C: We already have multiple reports from Vista reviewers of playback
problems with video and audio content, with video frames dropped and audio
stuttering even on high-end systems. Time will tell whether this problem is
due to immature drivers, or has been caused by the overhead imposed by Vista's
content protection mechanisms interfering with playback."

Vista RC2 was installed on my box for about 2 days, and yes, this was happening too... now I know why.

 

[kiwimac]

Well, that's one way to make a product undesirable. Seems strange that MS would do it to themselves but whatever...

kiwimac