A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection

Peter Gutmann, pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
Last updated 12 June 2007 (but see the note below)
Distributed under the Creative Commons license (see Appendix)

In early August of this year I gave a talk at a security conference with a significantly more up-to-date and cleaned-up version of this material (the writeup here was originally written for comment on a private security mailing list and had to be somewhat hastily retrofitted for non-security-geeks). In addition this text was mostly written nearly a year ago and predates a number of events such as the appearance of hardware with PVP-UAB support, about 100-odd MB of Vista updates, and entire stories like the GigE slowdown issue (although that has nothing to do with content protection). This means that this writeup exhibits the inevitable bit-rot of broken links, stories that have changed, updated or changed technical information, and so on. Finally, numerous images and diagrams don't integrate too well into this text-only writeup (the talk material is in PDF form, which makes it easier to include graphical content). So the slides for the talk are the recommended form if you want to read about this, with an optional version annotated for the humour-impaired. I've also put up a brief comment about statements by the George and Ed tag team at ZDNet for people who were wondering about that.