If the firmware on this device can and will be updated from time to time,
then the driver for the device should facilitate this in some secure
fashion. Is the hardware and driver(s) produced by someone other than your
organization? If so, then I question whether you should be allowed to
update firmware in this device at all. But, that aside, if this is the
case, uninstalling the existing driver and loading your driver would
probably be the way to go. Getting the old driver back in correctly would
likely require the user to rerun the software installation for the device.
Not a pleasant user experience, and not really a kosher way of going about
things. Better, would be if the existing driver was updated in total with
the new firmware in the driver image. This minimizes exposure of the
hardware to malicious firmware, and would allow the user to just run an
update script or some such. And you could get a package like this signed.
If you want a bad hack, you could install a lower WDM filter to the device
and send commands down from it. The problem with this is you will have to
be very careful not to interfere with the operation of the device(s).
–
Bill McKenzie
“Deevi, Srinivasa” wrote in message
news:xxxxx@ntdev…
>
> Hi all
>
>
> I needed some solution for downloading firmware on to a USB device. Our
> Device
> will have different VID and PID depending on the client and different
> drivers will be loaded for them . We need to download the firmware updates
> as and when they come . Before downloading the firmware , we need to send
a
> Vendor specific command to put the device into Boot mode . For doing that
we
> need to uninstall what ever driver was loaded on that VID and PID , and
then
> load our firmware upgrade driver . After this we can send vendor specific
> command and then download our firmware to the device . I am looking for a
> solution with out disturbing the previous installation , Is there any way
to
> send a Vendor specific commmand directly with out depending on the driver
> what is loaded before ? Once the device is put into Boot mode , rest of
the
> job is taken care with a known VID and PID .
>
> One solution what I thought is put the System into Diagnostic mode , and
> send Vendor specific mode to put the device into Boot mode and then later
on
> use our VID and PID to do updating the firmware . But that option is not
> implemented in XP anymore I believe . So I am looking for an option which
> can work on both W2K and WXP machines.
>
> Any ideas ?
>
> Thanks in advance
> srinivasa
> Can anybody help me what we can do for this problem ?
>
> Thanks
> srinivasa
>
>