Vista and driver signing.

I'm a user of CoreTemp, nice little program for watching the temperature of many processors.

Since going to Vista, i've found that it won't start properly, and after looking through the CoreTemp forums, found that the author posted that he won't be able to get the program working for Vista x64 as he can't afford to get the drivers signed.

http://www.thecoolest.zerobrains.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=171&sid=242d1b7f6ba8802c546a489e70123578

From what I understand Vista now REQUIRES drivers to be signed or else it won't allow a program to load them, GCPUIDs/CoreTemps driver is not signed as both are free programs and driver signing costs silly money of like $500/year

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Now, i'm all for increasing stability and security, but surely Microsoft are just stifling people who try and make tools like this for no profit?

I weren't aware that you had to pay to have drivers singed. Thats just pure abuse of power by M$.

You don't need to write a kernel driver to get the CPU temperature. It's not Microsoft's fault he doesn't want to use API's that are already provided by the OS.

If he really does still want to remain independant then he can write a user-mode driver which don't need signing.

Thats just pure abuse of power by M$.

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Of course some people will view it like that. But ultimately it boils down to security. If anybody can load and execute their code in the kernel then the OS is 'fundamentally' insecure.

NathanE said:

You don't need to write a kernel driver to get the CPU temperature. It's not Microsoft's fault he doesn't want to use API's that are already provided by the OS.

If he really does still want to remain independant then he can write a user-mode driver which don't need signing.

Of course some people will view it like that. But ultimately it boils down to security. If anybody can load and execute their code in the kernel then the OS is 'fundamentally' insecure.

Click to expand...

That answers my question then. I actually thought Microsoft were being selfish and stifling things like this.

I might just go post and tell him about the alternate way.

Thanks NathanE.

NathanE said:

You don't need to write a kernel driver to get the CPU temperature. It's not Microsoft's fault he doesn't want to use API's that are already provided by the OS.

If he really does still want to remain independant then he can write a user-mode driver which don't need signing.

Of course some people will view it like that. But ultimately it boils down to security. If anybody can load and execute their code in the kernel then the OS is 'fundamentally' insecure.

Click to expand...

Hello, I'm the author of Core Temp.
I was wandering about this using APIs thing.
First of all, I'm not familiar with any way of accessing all MSR registers without a Kernel mode driver.
Why would I limit myself to using MS APIs when I have a perfectly good and working driver?
3rd, can you access ports without the kernel mode driver? The only way I know of is using a 3rd party driver and interfacing with it.

Use Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) API.

Why do you need to access the MSR registers directly? Don't you get tired of having to update your driver every time a new CPU comes out?

Before I had the driver, I was looking at the WMI to do this. I wasn't able to implement it, if I remember correctly it could not do what I needed it to. Either way I'm in contact with a company right now which will probably help me get the driver certified.

*EDIT*
Anyway, as far as I know, you can't use WMI to write to needed ports/MSRs.
Core Temp needs this function.
The driver also does not need to be updated, as it reads the addresses passed to it by the main program, so it acts as pure interface between the program and the hardware.

WMI just does not have this, it only reports the DMI information which is, in most cases, quite useless for this kind of program.