You can't just let people do anything from userland, the performance would tank. As for restricting kernelland, EU competition regulators would not be happy if MS was the only one able to write anti virus software that runs in kernelland.
Isn't the point of userland that you can (try to) do anything from there?
It seems like MacOS and Linux provide substantially safer alternatives that are still performant?
> As for restricting kernelland, EU competition regulators would not be happy
I keep seeing people say this. Is there a basis for that assertion, or is that mere speculation? Again, hasn't MacOS already deprecated kexts?
Via Google: https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/news/450420491/Mic...
(Also via myself, as I was at MS when we wanted to make this change and the EU said no.)
I think that would have been a proactive approach. That said, I'm not entirely convinced that the EU was right to place the restriction in the first place.
I think a proactive approach might have been for Microsoft to provide safer interfaces with the kernel, and then use those in its own security offerings.
That said, it does sound like EU competition regulation was a contributing factor here, and I think the EU is wrong on this one and that an OS vendor should not be required to provide unrestricted kernel access to allow security software vendors to compete.
Mostly unrelated, it seems somewhat interesting that this was Kaspersky insisting on kernel access... The US government seems convinced they are compromised.
[0]: https://www.ft.com/content/60dde560-194a-40d1-8c98-1d96d6d01...