As we known that Apple has complete control over the hardware and operating system but Microsoft has no controll over the hardware.
Now Microsoft is also aiming to bring its control over hardware through the partnerships with Windows PC makers. The goal is to protect devices from attacks that exploit the fact that firmware has higher privileges than the Windows kernel.
‘Secured-core’ initiative by Microsoft:
To take over the comand in the hardware the Microsoft has taken DRM-hacking lessons from the Xbox and applied them to the Windows hardware ecosystem under the new ‘Secured-core’ initiative.
You won’t see any ‘Secured-core’ branding on PCs and the technology will only exist on the latest Windows 10 hardware with chipsets from Intel, Qualcomm, and AMD.
But if you use new high-end hardware like the Surface Pro X and HP’s Dragonfly laptops, than you will enjoy an extra layer of security that isolates encryption keys and identity material from Windows 10, which could be compromised by attacks on device-specific firmware.
The new firmware protection comes with a Windows Defender feature called System Guard. That feature is intended to protect Windows 10 PCs from new attacks used by the likes of state-sponsored hacking group APT28 or Fancy Bear, which was caught late last year using a novel Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) rootkit to target Windows PCs.
Dave Weston, partner director of Windows security at Microsoft, told in an interview:
“If you get a piece of kernel-level malware on your standard operating system, the attacker can’t access critical features.”
“It’s pretty similar to what other manufacturers might be doing with a specific security chip, but we are doing this across all different manners of CPU architectures and OEMs, so we can bring this to a much broader audience, and they can select the form factor or product that matches them but with the same security guarantees as if Microsoft created it.”