No Backdoors in Vista: Microsoft

Published: March 8, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Microsoft won't be purposely building a backdoor into Windows Vista, despite BBC reports to the contrary, a developer with the Redmond software giant said on his blog this week.

Two weeks ago, the BBC ran a story on its Web site that the British government was in talks with Microsoft about installing a backdoor as a way around new encryption capabilities that will debut with Windows Vista. The concern was the combination of the new BitLocker Drive Encryption and the hardware-based Trusted Platform Module (TPM) would make it very difficult for British law environment to break into suspects' computers.

"Over my dead body" was the response of Niels Ferguson, a Microsoft developer and cryptographer, to the story. "The official line from high up is that we do not create backdoors," Ferguson writes on the System Integrity Team Blog. "And in the unlikely situation that we are forced to by law we'll either announce it publicly or withdraw the entire feature."