MS responds to Gutmann's Vista paper

[Ivan Krstić]

[Perry -- had a clause in there that made no sense; I shouldn't send
mail minutes after waking up. Please discard previous mail and send
along this one.]

[Moderator's note: Too late, sorry. --Perry]

Aside from admitting to increased CPU utilization, which seemed pretty
incontestable anyway, they're disputing [0] many of the points made in
the original paper [1]. Ignoring the hand-wavy arguments, I find most
interesting their claims that a) there will be no move away from unified
drivers, b) that HFS doesn't depend on driver-related video chip
features, and therefore won't impact (the creation of) open source
drivers, and c) that video quality is degraded only for specific premium
content rather than globally. Assuming all three are true, this would
downgrade the Vista content protection system from "cataclysmically
braindead" to merely "extremely braindead" -- a welcome downgrade, given
all of Peter's other points.

[0]
http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2007/01/20/windows-vista-content-protection-twenty-questions-and-answers.aspx
[1] http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

-- 
Ivan Krstić <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | GPG: 0x147C722D

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com