The Old New Thing

When people ask for security holes as features: Silent install of uncertified drivers

August 16, 2005 Aug 16, 2005 08/16/05

Raymond Chen

Probably the single greatest source of bluescreen crashes in Windows XP is buggy device drivers. Since drivers run in kernel mode, there is no higher authority checking what they're doing. If some user-mode code runs amok and corrupts memory, it's just corrupting its own memory. The process eventually crashes, but the system stays up. On ...