The brouhaha over developing third-party security applications for Windows Vista may be far from over, but Microsoft has followed up on a pledge it made last October to clue third-party security developers into the APIs they’ll need to use to tap into the Vista kernel.
In order to improve security in Windows Vista—at least, compared to the long-standing nightmare which has been security under Windows XP—Microsoft extended its PatchGuard technology to isolate the operation system kernel in the 64-bit edition of Windows Vista. The decision left no mechanisms for developers of third-party security applications—like Symantec and McAfee—to create security, scanning, and firewall products for the 64-bit version of Vista.
