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Seems like a way to bypass signed drivers. Sending drivers to Microsoft for signing takes a few weeks and costs money. I bet this certificate was used on proto
by jkot 11y ago
Seems like a way to bypass signed drivers. Sending drivers to Microsoft for signing takes a few weeks and costs money. I bet this certificate was used on prototypes, but was not removed from final version for some reason.
Source: I worked for hardware vendor and wrote windows drivers.
- rincebrain 11y agoI thought you could get a code signing cert from MS, but the WHQL qualification is what involves the latter phase?
- jkot 11y agoI am not sure about that, we were a small shop. Dell is bigger, but maybe has subcontractors.
- ryan-c 11y agoI have seen driver installers that just install their own CA. A particularly clever one generated a CA at install time, signed the driver, deleted the private key, then installed the driver, however this relied on internet access during install to timestamp the driver signature. I wonder if this works for kernel mode drivers?
- pjc50 11y agoThis is (a) hilarious and (b) a massive security hole in the whole concept of signed drivers.
- revelation 11y agoCan you actually do that? I was under the impression that the kernel driver root certs aren't under user control, and you basically have to boot your Windows in debug mode to run an unsigned driver. Surely people would just self-sign instead if that was possible.
- Dylan16807 11y agoThat doesn't explain why the private key was on the prototype itself.