Friday, September 19, 2008

Google denies reverse-engineering Vista

TECHNOLOGY:
The source code for Google's Chrome browser gave the impression that the company had reverse-engineered Windows Vista to employ a useful security feature, but the company said it didn't in fact do so.

The Chrome source code said a particular security feature available on Vista, Data Execution Prevention, can be used on Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003 SP1, though it's not documented for the older operating systems. The source code also said the feature can be understood with a disassembler, a method of reverse-engineering that deconstructs a binary file--such as Windows--into instructions more easily understood by a human.
An explanatory comment in the Chrome source code mentions use of a disassembler to figure out the security feature. "Completely undocumented from Microsoft. You can find this information by disassembling Vista's SP1 kernel32.dll with your favorite disassembler," the comment says.

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