Microsoft becoming software police say users
Microsoft last week slammed the door on a free utility out of Australia that outflanked one the company's touted security features in Windows Vista by having the program's digital certificate revoked.
Users took the company to task for the move, noting the slippery slope the company had stepped on, with some blasting Microsoft as playing "software police."
LinchpinLabs' Atsiv utility, released July 20, uses a signed driver to load other, unsigned code, into the Vista kernel, according to US-based Symantec researcher Ollie Whitehouse. Atsiv, said Whitehouse, thus let users circumvent a feature of the 64-bit version of Vista that allows only digitally-signed code to be loaded into the operating system's kernel. The digital signing requirement is one way Vista tries to stymie hackers from infiltrating the kernel — the heart of the OS — with, among other things, rootkit cloaking technologies that hide malware from security software.
