WINDOWS VISTA™ SECURITY: Securing Vista Against Malicious Attacks

Chapter 6. Application Security

Windows Vista changes several things with respect to applications and how they run. We looked at the most notable change, User Account Control (UAC) in Chapter 4. For developers, these changes require rethinking how you write applications. For system administrators, it means rethinking how you use them. This chapter is about how applications work on Windows Vista. Some parts are geared more to developers and some administrators who write their own code. Most of it should be of general interest to administrators who want to know how applications behave differently on Windows Vista. We also make good on the promise we made in Chapter 4, and show how to make an arbitrary application invoke the UAC prompt on launch.

Windows Vista makes some very fundamental changes in how applications run on top of it. It is difficult, therefore, to structure a chapter logically that describes it. In some ways, this chapter may seem like a grab bag, and it is. It covers technologies that did not merit their own chapter, but that all are important in their own right.

Client Security

The security of a client (as well as a stand-alone) computer is dependent on a large number of factors. Of course, the security of an individual computer depends for its security on the entities that control that security: the domain controller (DC) and the domain administrators, as well as any local administrators. In addition, the security of the client depends in large measure on the applications ...