The .NET Developer's Guide to Windows Security

Chapter 45. What Is ACL Inheritance?

Windows uses security descriptors (Item 42) with access control lists (Item 43) to track the security settings of sensitive objects in the operating system. Many of these ACLs are created and managed by the operating system automatically, such as those for kernel objects like processes, threads, shared memory sections, and so on. Although the programmer is allowed to specify these ACLs manually, it's rarely necessary. But an administrator usually needs to manage ACLs in places like the file system, directory service, and even sometimes the registry. Take the file system as an example. Have you ever counted the number of files on a file server? There can be hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of files, ...