Raymond Chen's blog has an interesting look at companies trying to bypass Windows XP's checks that a driver has been WHQL-certified:
My favorite stunt was related to my by a colleague who was installing a video card driver whose setup program displayed a dialog that read, roughly, "After clicking OK, do not touch your keyboard or mouse while we prepare your system." After you click OK, the setup program proceeds to move the mouse programmatically all over the screen, opening the Display control panel, clicking on the Advanced button, clicking through various other configuration dialogs, a flurry of activity for what seems like a half a minute. When faced with a setup program that does this, your natural reaction is to scream, "Aaaiiiiigh!" There are many more examples (in followup comments and links) of vendors cheating in the certification and install process: my new Dell laptop came with an usigned bluetooth driver whose setup automatically clicks on the Continue button of the dialogs while installing the driver the driver for a USB memory key [...] would install and auto-push the button on that warning dialog. XP SP2 added a new check for kernel memory pool corruption and guess what? This driver would blue-screen every time the memory key was plugged in. I work on a wifi product that sometimes is bundled with wifi cards. When packaged like that our installer also installs the wifi card dirver. Guess what. The suits are all upset about the "unsigned driver" warning, and they are sure that a programmer more clever than me could make them go away. Of course actually getting the drivers certified is too expensive. Excuse me while I get back to work on my TPS report. I still remember one of Linksys's Wireless B PCMCIA cards. I went to install the driver, the instructions actually said something to the tune of "Ignore this warning box, it doesn't mean anything important. Continue clicking OK on every screen until the driver finishes installing." Hell I could have put a box in that said "Click here to format your hard drive" and I'm sure some end users would have clicked OK. Cisco is a huge company, surely the WHQL payment isn't much to them. At a company I used to work for they had found away around that dialog box. They would silently launch the System Properties / Driver Signing Options dialog, send windows messages to select "Ignore" and then click ok, effectively turning off the dialog box (BTW, the code to re-enable the setting was commented out, so the installer made your machine less secure forever -- great stuff coming from a security company). More details at http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/08/16/452141.aspx. The best suggestion is that the warning be changed to: Warning! Your hardware manufacturer hasn't bothered to test this driver! Do you feel lucky? [Yes] [No] Peter. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
