McAfee joins Symantec protesting Vista kernel lockout

Stan Beer
Monday, 02 October 2006 17:22

Business IT - Security

The world's two largest security vendors are now in lockstep protesting against what they see as an attempt by Microsoft to shut them out of the Vista security market by leveraging its operating system monopoly.

• Announcements

McAfee has taken a full page ad in the Financial Times (FT) newspaper in protest against Microsoft preventing security vendors from accessing the Vista operating system kernel. Symantec claims that if Microsoft gets its way, Vista will be less secure than Windows XP.

Until now, the world's largest security vendor Symantec has led the protest against a number of security measures that Microsoft has taken with Vista, which security companies view as an attempt to leverage its operating system monopoly to lock out security vendors.

Symantec's and now McAfee's largest complaint is against a Microsoft system called Patchguard, which effectively puts the Vista kernel in a locked area which theoretically no-one, including third party security vendors can access.

Microsoft, claims Patchguard will make Vista more secure. However, Symantec and McAfee both say that Patchguard has already been hacked and Microsoft is really just preventing third party security vendors from developing products to protect the kernel from the inside out by denying them access.

Both Symantec and McAfee are using Europe, where Microsoft is already under strict antitrust scrutiny from regulators, as the stage from which to launch their battle to force Microsoft to unbundle its security features.