Windows Vista Content Protection

Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection for so-called premium content. This incurs significant costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software costs. These issues affect not only users of Vista, but also the entire PC industry. This talk looks at the technical details of Vista's content protection and the collateral damage that this incurs throughout the entire computer industry.

Peter Gutmann is a researcher in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, working on the design and analysis of cryptographic security architectures. He helped write the popular PGP encryption package; has authored a number of papers and RFC's on security and encryption, including the X.509 Style Guide for certificates; and is the author of Cryptographic Security Architecture: Design and Verification (published by Springer-Verlag) and the open source cryptlib security toolkit. In his spare time he pokes holes in whatever security systems and mechanisms catch his attention and grumbles about PKIs and the (un-)usability of security applications.