Windows Internals, Fifth Edition

Protecting Objects

Object protection and access logging is the essence of discretionary access control and auditing. The objects that can be protected on Windows include files, devices, mailslots, pipes (named and anonymous), jobs, processes, threads, events, keyed events, event pairs, mutexes, semaphores, shared memory sections, I/O completion ports, LPC ports, waitable timers, access tokens, volumes, window stations, desktops, network shares, services, registry keys, printers, and Active Directory objects.

Because system resources that are exported to user mode (and hence require security validation) are implemented as objects in kernel mode, the Windows object manager plays a key role in enforcing object security. (For more information on the ...