Vista Suicide Note -- rebuttal and response

By Cory Doctorow at 3:00 pm Thursday, Jan 25

Peter Gutmann, author of the "Vista Suicide Note" paper (in which he added up the cost of implementing all the dumb DRM in Vista), has responded to Microsoft's answer to his paper, in which they tried to spin the issue to make it all seem harmless. As with the original paper, the response is savage, funny, and fact-filled:

"Do things such as HFS (Hardware Functionality Scan) affect the ability of the open-source community to write a driver?

"No. HFS uses additional chip characteristics other than those needed to write a driver. HFS requirements should not prevent the disclosure of all the information needed to write drivers. "

This claim is directly contradicted by a document by the same author which states:

"Such tests could involve loading a surface with an image, and then getting the chip to apply various visual effects to the image and reporting back the resulting pixels. "

and then later on:

"The internal workings of the graphics chip must be kept secret, such that a hacker building an emulator could not find out the required information."

So this document, the primary reference for Vista's content protection, states exactly the opposite of what's said in Microsoft's response, namely that standard chip functionality (in this case graphics rendering in a GPU) is exercised for HFS, and that the device details have to be kept secret to prevent someone emulating the functionality.

Link (via Pwned)