Windows Vista: Interviews

Microsoft's Ben Fathi has a new job now that Vista has shipped, but the man who led the company's Security Technology Unit is still focused on keeping the bad guys away from your PC.

Microsoft finally rolled its Vista operating system out the door billing it as its most secure operating system ever, but what are the security features that will really matter to enterprise users?

Microsoft Tuesday released draft application programming interfaces designed to give independent security vendors a way to get around a kernel patch protection technology in Windows Vista. Known as PatchGuard, the Vista technology has been at the center of a simmering dispute between Microsoft and several security vendors who claim that PatchGuard hampers the ability of their products to deliver key security capabilities such as host-based intrusion detection. The technology has also been part of broader antitrust concerns in the European Union that Microsoft has been forced to respond to. Ben Fathi Microsoft's vice president for the Windows core operating system, talked about the draft APIs and the company's rationale for releasing them. Excerpts from that interview follow:

Symantec and McAfee say that a Microsoft technology called Patch Guard -- which blocks access to the 64-bit Vista kernel -- will make it harder for third-party security vendors to deliver certain features in their products.