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Practical Malware Analysis
book

Practical Malware Analysis

by Michael Sikorski, Andrew Honig
February 2012
Intermediate to advanced
800 pages
23h 55m
English
No Starch Press
Content preview from Practical Malware Analysis

Kernel vs. User Mode

Windows uses two processor privilege levels: kernel mode and user mode. All of the functions discussed in this chapter have been user-mode functions, but there are kernel-mode equivalent ways of doing the same thing.

Nearly all code runs in user mode, except OS and hardware drivers, which run in kernel mode. In user mode, each process has its own memory, security permissions, and resources. If a user-mode program executes an invalid instruction and crashes, Windows can reclaim all the resources and terminate the program.

Normally, user mode cannot access hardware directly, and it is restricted to only a subset of all the registers and instructions available on the CPU. In order to manipulate hardware or change the state in the ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781593272906Errata Page