British officials are concerned about encryption in Microsoft's forthcoming Windows Vista release, saying the technology could prevent law enforcement from reading suspects' computer files.
They claim certain new features within Vista,
while intended to do good, may actually set
back terrorism investigations.
The comments came as part of a larger House of Commons home affairs select committee meeting on holding terrorism suspects. Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge University, said, "from later this year, the encryption landscape is going to change with the release of Microsoft Vista."
Vista will come with a feature called BitLocker, which enables users to encrypt all the data on a system including the OS and boot sector.
The idea is to keep data on stolen laptops from being accessed, but it also means it will become "seriously difficult" to read encrypted information off the hard disk, says Anderson.