The launch of Vista is upon us - today being the day you can get Vista off the shelf. We all should know how much money Vista will set you back by now, but security Peter Guttman is asking a different question.

Vista will have support for next-generation DVD formats HD-DVD and Blu-ray. Subsequently, this means it has the ability to decrypt content protected with the new AACS copy protection system built into the operating system.

In a nutshell, some of this copy protection allows content producers to deliberately downscale the resolution of ‘premium content’ if it’s not coming over a protected link, such as a normal DVI or VGA link to your monitor and not the new HDMI connector (with HDCP). The whole idea of this is to prevent the piracy of high definition content.

All the code to faciliate this has been built deep into the bowels of Vista, and Gutmann asks in his paper ‘A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection’ - is it worth it?

It’s a fairly technically heavy read, but it raises some very interesting points about this protection technology, and the performance and other costs of having this technology built into the OS.

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