A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection

[Peter Gutmann]

Some people have asked for references for the information in the writeup,
these weren't so easy to provide because some of the content was from non-
public sources, but after a fair bit of searching I've managed to find public
locations for much of the information.  It's in the updated online version at
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt.  The comments by an
ATI product manager are particularly illuminating, the phrase "increased costs
will be passed on to consumers" seems to appear on every second slide of his
presentation.

Peter.

-- Snip --

Sources
-------

Because this writeup started out as a private discussion in email, a number of
the sources used were non-public.  The best public sources that I know of are:

"Output Content Protection and Windows Vista",
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/stream/output_protect.mspx, from WHDC.

"Windows Longhorn Output Content Protection",
http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/8/f/98f3fe47-dfc3-4e74-92a3-088782200fe7/TWEN05006_WinHEC05.ppt,
from WinHEC.

"How to Implement Windows Vista Content Output Protection",
http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/b/9/5b97017b-e28a-4bae-ba48-174cf47d23cd/MED038_WH06.ppt,
from WinHEC.

"Protected Media Path and Driver Interoperability Requirements",
http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/8/f/98f3fe47-dfc3-4e74-92a3-088782200fe7/TWEN05005_WinHEC05.ppt,
from WinHEC.

An excellent analysis from one of the hardware vendors involved in this comes
from ATI, in the form of "Digital Media Content Protection",
http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/8/f/98f3fe47-dfc3-4e74-92a3-088782200fe7/TWEN05002_WinHEC05.ppt,
from WinHEC.  This points out (in the form of PowerPoint bullet-points) the
manifold problems associated with Vista's content-protection measures, with
repeated mention of increased development costs, degraded performance and the
phrase "increased costs passed on to consumers" pervading the entire
presentation like a mantra.

(Note that the crypto requirements have changed since some of the information
above was published, for example SHA-1 has been deprecated in favour of
SHA-256 and SHA-512, and public keys seem to be uniformly set at 2048 bits in
place of the mixture of 1024-bit and 2048-bit mentioned in the presentations).

In addition there have been quite a few writeups on this (although not going
into as much detail as this document) in magazines both online and in print,
one example being PC World's feature article "Will your PC run Windows
Vista?", http://www.pcw.co.uk/articles/print/2154785, which covers this in the
appropriately-titled section "Multimedia in chains".  Audience reactions at
WinHEC are covered in "Longhorn: tough trail to PC digital media" published in
EE Times (http://www.eetimes.com/issue/fp/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=162100180),
unfortunately you need to be a subscriber to read this but you may be able to
find accessible cached copies using your favourite search engine.

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