Windows Vista x64 To Require Signed Drivers

Anonymous Coward writes "With little fanfare, Microsoft just announced that the x64 version of Windows Vista will require all kernel-mode code to be digitally signed. This is very different than the current WHQL program, where the user ultimately decides how they want to handle unsigned drivers. Vista driver developers must obtain a Publisher Identity Certificate (PIC) from Microsoft. Microsoft says they won't charge for it, but they require that you have a Class 3 Commercial Software Publisher Certificate from Verisign. This costs $500 [EUR 412] per year, and as the name implies, is only available to commercial entities."

Comments

First they lock out open source drivers

[etymxris]

Next, applications? I'm not sure how they'll deal with developer machines, but then again, that problem should apply for drivers too. It's not really a slippery slope. They've been doing it on the xbox for years, after all. It's not so much the money as the control they have to vet everything that can run on their system.

From the nail-in-the-coffin department...

[pdbogen]

All I can say is what's probably come to everyone else's mind: the banging sound of hammer against coffin.
This will certainly quiet complaints about Windows' crashing (since many crashes are related to poorly written drivers, WHQL or not), but how did whomever thought this would be a good idea completely forget about the serious compatbility issues that this will raise?

Re:From the nail-in-the-coffin department...

[Nimey]

Signing has nothing to do with driver quality. This will ensure that only officially-blessed drivers, regardless of quality will run on 64-bit Vista. DRM is the only conceivable reason for this move.

Ooh lovely

[JediTrainer]

While I applaud the idea of signed drivers and the like, this looks like a very clever way to shut out OSS developers. Heck - some of the smaller commercial outfits might even balk at having to spend that kind of money on the certificate.

What pains me is knowing full well that this really won't necessarily increase the quality of the drivers, though. So they're signed. So what? All this might do is delay upgrades, if anything.

Re:Ooh lovely

[doctormetal]

I, for one, think this is great. It now *forces* companies like Creative, NVidia, ATI, RealTek, and other big hardware vendors to make their drivers go through and pass Windows Hardware Quality Labs testing. I know that doesn't guarantee it 100% perfectly working driver, but in my experience it does mean generally better drivers, which in turn means a more stable system. That's a good thing for millions of consumers, coming at the cost of ... $500/year for corporations.

WHQL testing does not lead to better drivers.
I had a lot of problem with drivers that were WHQL tested and failed to work.
That certification process means absolutely nothing.

Re:why are they calling it x64?

[RingDev]

AMD is a chip manufacturer. em64t is a memory system. x86 is a chipset architexture. Perhaps Vista is designed to run on multiple 64b architextures (itaniam, sparc, ppc AND x86). In which case, the "x" in x64 represents the underlying architexture.

-Rick

STUPID

[Chanc_Gorkon]

Does Microsoft even know the amount of drivers that ARE NOT signed?? This is stupid and it won't prevent anything. Is Microsoft going to look over thousands of drivers just to make sure they don't cause anything bad so they can put thier little WHQL seal and sign the blasted thing? What's to prevent someone from creating a hack that gets around this? Nothing. Why even try to do something like this? At least give users the option to screw up the system.

What about switching the root cert?

[Halo-]

Okay, so MS requires all kernel drivers to be signed. That's ugly, but anything has that is signed has to be verified to the meaningful. The certificate used to verify the signatures is still stored in software at this time, right?

So, what's to stop me from replacing the certificate which comes with Windows with my own, and then just resigning all the drivers?

(Okay, the DMCA for one... grrr....)

I don't think this if going to make Windows unhackable until hardware support for the certs is added. (which is pretty close, I think...)

Re:It's all about the DRM.

[topical_surfactant]

I dare say that Vista will be rather...unpopular in the developer community.

Not true...

[DaHat]

if you actually read the MSDN page on this subject you will find that non administrators will be prevented from installing unsigned drivers... so not unlike many OSS OS's... you just need to SU or runas up to a root/Administrators account and install you drivers and then revert back to your normal privileges.

It's just that easy!

Re:why are they calling it x64?

[frankie]

Why is this so difficult for so many people to figure out? Microsoft doesn't want to play favorites in the x86 war. They don't want to say either "x86-64" or "EMT64" and offend the other chipmaker, so they just call it generic "x64". It's obvious.

You CANNOT do this in the production version

[kawika]

Read on, it says that the BCDEDIT option will be removed before final Vista code ships, perhaps as early as Vista RC1.

64bit ?

[jeriqo]

Why not on the 32bit version ?
This doesn't make any sense to me.

Re:64bit ?

[burndive]

Backwards compatability.

All drivers for 64-bit XP need to be rebuilt, since the 32-bit versions used with XP won't work in a 64-bit operating system. There are currently no 64-bit XP drivers to be backward-compatible with, so MS is setting the bar where it wants for all new drivers. They can't do the same with 32-bit because they have to be compatible with the unsigned 32-bit drivers already on the market for XP.

64-bit is the future of desktop computing, and MS doesn't want have to support unsigned drivers in future versions of Windows.

Re:It's all about the DRM.

[mrchaotica]

Can I use the Windows API and play a CD's audio tracks from a home brew .Net app?

The Windows API will have very little to do with it. Basically, it'll depend on what you want to do.

For example, just sending the audio to the "Trusted" (i.e. restricted) output devices will work, but "faking" the hardware so as to capture the digital stream to use for Fair Use won't (this is exactly why they're requiring all drivers to be cryptographically signed).

And there won't be a damn thing you can do about it!

If the application level is unaffected by this, then its not that bad.

I'm sure it wasn't that bad when the NAZIs started forcing the Jews to wear stars, either.

But if they are enforcing restrictions to the application layer, this could really stiffle non-professional windows development.

Does the phrase "digital serf" mean anything to you? 'Cause that's what Microsoft, the RIAA, and the MPAA want to turn us all into. It won't just stifle non-professional Windows development, it'll stifle culture and creativity in general by setting up tolls every time anyone wants to communicate an idea. It will be like Bellsouth's "two-tiered internet [sic]" but infinitely worse.

Re:All this will do...

[mrchaotica]

First of all, this is already an actual problem, because even if you -- the developer -- can compile and sign the software, nobody else can. You might as well just make it closed source, because the DRM won't allow anyone else to usefully edit it anyway!

Second, if we (collectively) don't do something about this now, in a few years it will be too late: a large enough percentage of hardware will be Treacherous that the RIAA/MPAA/BSA/Microsoft will be able to buy a law making non-Treacherous hardware and software (necessarily including all Free Software) illegal.*

What good will your open source project do, when nobody is allowed to use it?

(Not to mention that they won't be able to download it to begin with, because the ISPs won't allow (either voluntarily or by law) non-Treacherous clients on the network.)

*it's about National Security, you see. Good of the country and all that...

You're neglecting one important fact...

[jd]

Since only commercial vendors can be licensed, any garage developer (Messers Hewlett and Packard, for example) can build their own hardware but NOT be licensed to produce a driver for it. Only a pre-existing commercial vendor can do that, and most won't unless you pay them.

This not only means that you can't have third-party drivers, it ALSO means you can't have 1st party drivers from start-ups. It effectively prohibits anyone new from entering the hardware arena.

But there's more! Although Microsoft's license is "free", they aren't necessarily going to give a license to everyone. Thus, they can effectively ban technology they don't like. Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD is going to be the shortest battle on record, if all it will take is for Microsoft to prohibit rival systems running on "their" desktops.

There is a way round the problem, but it puts you at risk from the DMCA as (by definition) it is circumventing security technology. By having a hypervisor-like OS running at the lowest level, and then having Vista run on top of that, you can make any piece of physical hardware look like any other piece of hardware that you like. Nothing Vista can do about it, as it can't see the hardware directly, all it can see is the results of pushing data of one type in one direction, then pulling data of another type in the opposite direction.

Re:It's all about the DRM.

[Rhys]

And there won't be a damn thing you can do about it until someone finds the first security exploit in the OS!

So we should have to wait all of what, negative five minutes?

Seriously. This just copy protection at the OS level. People break game copy protection all the time. People will find a security hole in Vista and use it to do the exact same thing (where's the statement that tests the signed condition... yes some nops there would do nicely) and it'll be wide open again. In the worst case there is always the ability of something like a mod chip to alter signals on the fly. I'd have faith if the hardware gurus can do it to a Xbox they can do it to a PC.

It is as bad as MMO makers claiming they're going to detect and ban bots. If my bot is a linux router with a usb hookup and a "keyboard" program running to feed "user interaction" to the game-running windows machine, they can't detect it. To them nothing is out of the ordinary. Sure, you have to decode the packet stream but that isn't /that/ hard. The information MMOs send isn't that different from what MUDs send, and people have been scripting those for years. The best the MMO maker can do is use hieuristics to watch for "bot-like" behavior but even that is questionable at best. (I'm sure I look like a bot by about 2 am if I'm up playing that late)

Its simple

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the "foot in the door". Next release of Windows will almost certainly support 64 bit only, then they have no unsigned drivers anymore. This gives a transition time to force all the holdovers like VMware who ship unsigned drivers to get them signed....what choice do they have, abandon the vast majority of their potential market?

Doing it all at once would attract too much attention outside the rabble rousers like Slashdot. By the time the implications are noticed by the popular press, its been this way "since the beginning" for 64 bit drivers and they'll trot out some statistics on crashes to prove this is better. And getting those stats will be easy, since you need a relatively new system to run 64 bit Vista, they WILL have better reliability so MS won't even have to lie.

The end of Installable File Systems?

[yeremein]

Currently it's possible to read/write ext3 volumes from Windows XP using an installable file system (IFS) driver.

Will this be a thing of the past after Longhorn ships?

Re:To be honest...

[mrchaotica]

something that someone else produced and can damn well provide to you under whatever restrictions they please because *they created it, and you didn't*

No, THIS it what's "divorced from reality!"

Nowhere in US copyright law does it say anything remotely like this -- no matter how much the publishers wish it did. The real reality is that ideas are not property, except in the sense that they belong to the culture as a whole. The foundation of copyright law is based on a social contract designed to promote the general welfare (i.e. Common Good), not to give creators and/or publishers any kind of entitlement! That's why copyright expires, if you couldn't figure it out before. Copyright is actually a lease -- artists lease a monopoly from the government for a period of time (originally 14 years), and make payment in the form of the creative work itself.

if a content owner tells you that you can only watch it while standing naked in your living room bouncing on one foot with half your nutsack shaved, thats their business.

That's completely and utterly false -- the courts have struck down many less insane restrictions (by the way, did you ever hear of Betamax?).

Here's the bottom line: There's no such thing as a "content owner," what you call "media" is actually our culture (which everyone has a right to experience), and the social contract whereby we (as citizens) allow artists to enjoy monopoly status is revokable by the people, if the artists fail to hold up their end of the bargain. Although many don't agree with me yet, I believe this has already happened.

Chill People

[logicnazi]

It isn't clear yet that they are trying to *securely* prevent loading unsigned drivers into the kernel. There might just be a config setting or other toggle that hackish users can flip to load unsigned code into the kernel.

In fact it would seem they would have to have such a toggle. Otherwise how are even commercial software companies supposed to develop this code? Not only would it be a pain to sign the driver every time you are testing the latest code changes it would require giving access to the signing keys to whoever compiles a kernel extension.

As an aside this scheme seems totally useless for the proposed purpose. The makers of malware are just going to steal a legitamate software developers secret key and sign their code with that. MS won't be able to anything because tons of people will be mad if windows update breaks their computer. However, I don't know whether to credit this to stupidity or malicousness (just want to make it difficult for normal people to use OSS kernel level code).

Re:All this will do...

[lgw]

Your rant seems to have nothing to do with Microsoft requiring signed drivers in kernel space for Vista.

The infrastructure for signing drivers has been in place for years, anyone with a CA can sign them, and it's up to the user to decide whether he trusts the signer. I think Windows Data Center 2003 actually forbids unsigned drivers already.

Now, if microsoft is requiring kernel drivers to be signed *and* requiring they be signed by WHQL *and* failing to get all the drivers anyone would care about out of kernel space, *then* this would be annoying. But *that* would mean people couldn't play the latest must-have game on Vista for weeks after they could play it on XP (since needed video driver updates almost always accompany the big-name games).

Microsoft isn't that stupid - no one will buy Vista if they have to wait weeks to play the very games that people buy new computers in order to play. The fact that malware will no longer be able to install a rootkit without getting the user to agree to a driver install warning dialog will be nice, however.