Introduction This post examines what the Microsoft’s compiler does in response to a variety of special functions that implement atomic operations and memory barriers. If you program like a civilized human being, that is with spinlocks and mutexes, this is a lot of things you should never need to care about. I’ve written a similar [...]
This baffled me for a while: I used certmgr to see if a Windows 10 machine had a root certificate that was needed to certify a certain digital signature, and it wasn’t listed. But then the signature was validated. And not only that, the root certificate was suddenly present in certmgr. Huh? Here’s a quick [...]
Introduction This is my best effort to summarize the steps to attestation signing for Windows drivers (see Microsoft’s main page on this). I’m mostly a Linux guy with no connections inside Microsoft, so everything written below is based upon public sources, trial and (a lot of) error, some reverse engineering, and speculations. This couldn’t be [...]
The goal The envisioned work flow for certificate generation is that the end user requests a certificate from a CA by first generating a public / private key pair, and then sending a request for having the public key certified by the CA. This way, the CA is never exposed to the private key. This [...]
Intro Crypto is not my expertise. This is a pile of jots I wrote down as I tried to figure out what the Microsoft catalogue file is all about. Not-so-surprising spoiler: It appears to be organized and elegant at first glance, but the more you look into it, it’s a mess. Of the kind that’s [...]