Windows® Internals, Sixth Edition, Part 1

Windows was designed from the start to be secure and to meet the requirements of various formal government and industry security ratings, such as the Common Criteria for Information Technology Security Evaluation (CCITSE) specification. Achieving a government-approved security rating allows an operating system to compete in that arena. Of course, many of these capabilities are advantageous features for any multiuser system.

The core security capabilities of Windows include discretionary (need-to-know) and mandatory integrity protection for all shareable system objects (such as files, directories, processes, threads, and so forth), security auditing (for accountability of subjects, or users and the actions they initiate), user authentication at logon, and the prevention of one user from accessing uninitialized resources (such as free memory or disk space) that another user has deallocated.

Windows has three forms of access control over objects. The first form—discretionary access control—is the protection mechanism that most people think of when they think of operating system security. It’s the method by which owners of objects (such as files or printers) grant or deny access to others. When users log in, they are given a set of security credentials, or a security context. When they attempt to access objects, their security context is compared to the access control list on the object they are trying to access to determine whether they have permission to perform the requested operation.

Privileged access control is necessary for those times when discretionary access control isn’t enough. It’s a method of ensuring that someone can get to protected objects if the owner isn’t available. For example, if an employee leaves a company, the administrator needs a way to gain access to files that might have been accessible only to that employee. In that case, under Windows, the administrator can take ownership of the file so that he can manage its rights as necessary.

Finally, mandatory integrity control is required when an additional level of security control is required to protect objects that are being accessed from within the same user account. It’s used both to isolate Protected Mode Internet Explorer from a user’s configuration and to protect objects created by an elevated administrator account from access by a nonelevated administrator account. (See Chapter 6 for more information on User Account Control—UAC.)

Security pervades the interface of the Windows API. The Windows subsystem implements object-based security in the same way the operating system does; the Windows subsystem protects shared Windows objects from unauthorized access by placing Windows security descriptors on them. The first time an application tries to access a shared object, the Windows subsystem verifies the application’s right to do so. If the security check succeeds, the Windows subsystem allows the application to proceed.

For a comprehensive description of Windows security, see Chapter 6.

Registry

If you’ve worked at all with Windows operating systems, you’ve probably heard about or looked at the registry. You can’t talk much about Windows internals without referring to the registry because it’s the system database that contains the information required to boot and configure the system, systemwide software settings that control the operation of Windows, the security database, and per-user configuration settings (such as which screen saver to use).

In addition, the registry is a window into in-memory volatile data, such as the current hardware state of the system (what device drivers are loaded, the resources they are using, and so on) as well as the Windows performance counters. The performance counters, which aren’t actually “in” the registry, are accessed through the registry functions. See Chapter 4 for more on how performance counter information is accessed from the registry.

Although many Windows users and administrators will never need to look directly into the registry (because you can view or change most configuration settings with standard administrative utilities), it is still a useful source of Windows internals information because it contains many settings that affect system performance and behavior. (If you decide to directly change registry settings, you must exercise extreme caution; any changes might adversely affect system performance or, worse, cause the system to fail to boot successfully.) You’ll find references to individual registry keys throughout this book as they pertain to the component being described. Most registry keys referred to in this book are under the systemwide configuration, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, which we’ll abbreviate throughout as HKLM.

For further information on the registry and its internal structure, see Chapter 4.

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