In February, a BBC News story suggested that the British government was in discussions with Microsoft over backdoor access to the operating system. A backdoor is a method of bypassing normal authentication to gain access to a computer without to the PC user knowing.
But Microsoft has now quelled the suggestion that law enforcement might get such access.
"Microsoft has not and will not put 'backdoors' into Windows," a company representative said in a statement sent via e-mail.
The discussion centres on BitLocker Drive Encryption, a planned security feature for Vista, the update to the Windows operating system. BitLocker encrypts data to protect it if the computer is lost or stolen.
This feature could make it harder for law enforcement agencies to get access to data on seized computers.
"The suggestion is that we are working with governments to create a back door so that they can always access BitLocker-encrypted data," Niels Ferguson, a developer and cryptographer at Microsoft, wrote on Thursday on a corporate blog. "Over my dead body," he wrote in his post titled "Back-door nonsense."
Microsoft is talking to various governments about Vista. However, the talks are about using the new operating system and BitLocker for their own security, Ferguson wrote. "We also get questions from law enforcement organisations. They foresee that they will want to read BitLocker-encrypted data, and they want to be prepared," he wrote.
"Back doors are simply not acceptable," Ferguson wrote. "Besides, they wouldn't find anybody on this team willing to implement and test the back door."
Windows Vista, the successor to Windows XP, is slated to be available by year's end.
I'm usually quite a trusting soul but Microsoft denying backdoors to their software is really stretching it for me. Perhaps not for the Brits but for the NSA you could just about bet on it.
With such a soft-on security; virtually all of the pundits have noted that MS's version of security doesn't compare with anyone else's; it's hard to imagine they haven't left something wide open. I would have thought it fairly obvious that all the operating system code needed to have buffer overflows denied at every port & that would take one piece of code added in with minimal time wasting & one or two million locks that would minimise Windows ability to do stuff -> aye, there's the rub!
To lose the ease or not to lose the ease? That's the question. Whether it would be nobler to shut this friggin' extraneous software (which makes us think that Microsoft is really cool!) down or allow the NSA access & you to do the easy things you bought Microsoft for?
Hm! I think not - leave it working but change the way it gets there so that when someone simple tries it they think it's been fixed. The fact that it hasn't won't hurt them.