When installing programs, applications or drivers, the user may experience some problems with the publisher of these products. In some cases, you may receive a warning that the product does not have a digital signature, in others - the program may not work at all because the operating system will block it. The way out of this situation may be to disable the verification of digital signatures for drivers in Windows 7. But before you do this, let's figure out what we are dealing with.
What it is
Despite the fact that disabling the digital signature verification of Windows 10 drivers (and any other OS) is literally five minutes, you always need to know exactly why you are doing this.
When developing any software, the manufacturer puts a special label on it to protect its product from third-party developers. After applying the signature, the product can no longer be changed without destroying it, which means that the absence of an EDS is a signal of a threat to the security of your PC. However, far from all software without a signature is dangerous. Perhaps the developer simply did not spend money on official signatures. So judge for yourself how useful the digital signature of drivers is. Disabling digital signature verification will only lead to the fact that when you install unknown software you will not be notified about this, and the OS will quietly allow the new process to work.
Security
Before disabling driver digital signature verification, be sure to understand what you are doing. There are many options for which you might need to do this. For example, you know exactly where the software came from and trust the publisher. Moreover, you yourself are engaged in the development of programs and decided to test your brainchild in the "field" conditions. In this situation, checking lock is the only right decision that a programmer can make.
Or, let's say you downloaded the game through the Steam service, and it does not start, and in the comments, users recommend that the operating system be prohibited from checking drivers. But in this case, the same thing can happen as with the infamous Black Desert. Together with her, the program "Thor.exe" was installed on the computer, which heavily loaded the system and began to wind up traffic for bitcoins at your expense.
As you can see, the risks are far from comparable. In any case, you decide whether to risk your system for the installation of dubious applications. In addition, if you do something wrong, as stated in the instructions, your system can be very seriously affected. Be sure to complete all the steps exactly as written.
Loading
Finally, we got to the basic information for which our article was written: "Digitally Signing Drivers: Disabling Digital Signature Verification." We will start with the simplest option.
You can configure this option when selecting "special options" to boot the operating system. Moreover, this method works both on the "seven" and on all subsequent versions of operating systems.
- To use this tip in Windows 7, when booting up your personal computer, press F8. After that, a menu will appear in which you can select the item "Disable mandatory driver signature verification".
- Everything is a little more complicated when we talk about Windows 8. Open the right "drop-down" panel and select "Options". After that, go to "Change ...". The following walk-through menu will appear. In Update and Restore, select the second option and specify specific options. After that reboot. As a result, another window will open before you. Go to "Diagnostics", and then to "Options ...". Click "Reboot" and select the desired option.
- With the “ten”, everything is similar to the previous version.
As you can see, digital signatures in Windows 7 are disabled the easiest in this case. However, there are more general options that suit most operating systems. It is also worth noting that this method is good only if you need to install drivers. It is likely that at the next regular boot of the operating system, they may stop working.
Administration
It is worth making a reservation right away. In Windows 10 Basic, this feature is not available, but it works great in the Pro version. On earlier operating systems, this method also works without much trouble.
To use this feature, we need to start the Group Policy Editor. To do this, open the Start menu. At the bottom of the screen that opens, there is a search box. In it you need to enter gpedit.msc. In addition, there is another way to start this service. Press the key combination Win + R. In the dialog box that opens, also write this command.
After entering, you will see the Group Policy Management menu. In the left half of the window, go through the "tree" of folders in the following way. First find the "User Configuration". In it, open the "Administrative Templates". After that, you need to go to the "System", and then to "Install the driver."
At the end of the "path", three items will appear in the right window, one of which is the "Digitally Signed Drivers" we are looking for. Disabling the digital signature is done from the internal menu. Double-click on the desired item, and the corresponding window will appear. After that, you have two options:
- In the drop-down list just select "Disable". After that, this function will stop working at all and will resume its activity only after you do the same operation again.
- Leave the "Enable" item selected, but a little lower, in the action options, specify "Skip unsigned drivers."
Command line
Another option, how to disable driver digital signature verification in Windows, is hidden in the ability to handle the command line. This method is preferable if you have the ability to start the console, but the shell itself works with difficulty.
There are two sets of commands that must be entered in order for this method to work. In this case, be sure to include the command line in administration mode. So here is what you have to enter.
- For both cases, you will need the bcdedit.exe command. Otherwise, only the additional parameters set by the -set tag will differ. After you have registered everything, specify the nointegritychecks ON parameter. This is important: you must "enable" this option, since it is responsible for disabling signature verification. If you need to return everything back, write the exact same command, only with the OFF parameter.
- The second option will require you to register the team twice. Only as parameters will it be necessary to specify first loadoptions DISABLE_INTEGRITY_CHECKS, and then TESTSIGNING ON. After entering each operation, you should see a message stating that the operation completed successfully.
Fake
If driver digital signing is bothering you, disabling digital signature verification is not the only option. You can always try to sign the driver yourself. So to say, fake the signature so that the operating system considers them to be real. However, this method only works on the Seven. In later operating systems, this feature is not available.
In short, this method will contain three steps:
- Create a certificate.
- Add it to the repository of trusted publishers and certification authorities.
- Sign the driver.
In general, the procedure is quite complicated and illegal, so we will not seriously consider it here. And in the case of installing ready-made software, this method will not help us, since invading compiled and configured other people's files is simply dangerous for the integrity of the program itself and its performance.
Summary
Today we examined many different ways to achieve our goals, which can be used by anyone, even the most illiterate user. The only thing is, think carefully several times how beneficial it is for you to put your computer at risk, and how justified is the desire, for example, to play a computer toy, in order to then lose a lot of personal data from the computer because the digital signature of the drivers has not been verified. Disabling digital signature verification should be done only in extreme cases.
As an additional recommendation, it is worth advising the following. After you finish all operations with unsigned drivers, return all settings to their place. You never know at what point this or that service can come in handy.