The trial of a French security researcher last week has become a cause celebre. Its outcome will decide if interested parties can "peek under the bonnet" in testing the road-worthiness of security products without falling foul of French law.

The case began more than three years ago when Guillaume Tena (AKA Guillermito) released proof of concept code to highlight security bypass and worm evasion flaws in Viguard, an antivirus product, from French company Tegam. Tena produced exploits showing that Tegam's generic anti-virus failed to stop "100 per cent of known and unknown viruses" as claimed. He posted his findings to a French usenet newsgroup in the summer of 2001 before published the research on a website in March 2002.

By John Leyden at The Register.

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