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xix
Foreword
It’s both a pleasure and an honor for me to write the foreword for this latest edition of
Windows Internals. Many significant changes have occurred in Windows since the last edition
of the book, and David, Mark, and Alex have done an excellent job of updating the book to
address them. Whether you are new to Windows internals or an old hand at kernel develop-
ment, you will find lots of detailed analysis and examples to help improve your understand-
ing of the core mechanisms of Windows as well as the general principles of operating system
design.
Today, Windows enjoys unprecedented breadth and depth in the computing world. Variants
of the original Windows NT design run on everything from Xbox game consoles to desktop
and laptop computers to clusters of servers with dozens of processors and petabytes of stor-
age. Advances such as hypervisors, 64-bit computing, multicore and many-core processor
designs, flash-based storage, and wireless and peer-to-peer networking continue to provide
plenty of interesting and innovative areas for operating system design.
One such area of innovation is security. Over the past decade, the entire computing indus-
try—and Microsoft in particular—has been confronted with huge new threats, and security
has become the top issue facing many of our customers. Attacks such as Blaster and Sasser
threatened to bring the entire Internet to its knees, and Windows was at the eye of the hur-
ricane. It was obvious to us that we could no longer afford to do business as usual, as many
of the usability and simplicity features designed into Windows were being used to attack it
for nefarious reasons. At first the hackers were teenagers trying to gain notoriety by breaking
into systems or adding graffiti to a corporate Web site, but pretty soon the attacks intensified
and went underground. The hackers became more sophisticated and evaded inspection. You
rarely see headlines about viruses and worms these days, but make no mistake—botnets and
identity theft are big business today, as are industrial and government espionage through
targeted attacks.
In January 2002, Bill Gates sent his now-famous “Trustworthy Computing” memorandum to
all Microsoft employees. It was a call to action that resonated well and charted the course
for how we would build software and conduct business over the coming years. Nearly the
entire Windows engineering team was diverted to work on Windows XP SP2, a service pack
dedicated almost entirely to improving the security of the operating system. The Security
Development Lifecycle (SDL) was developed and applied to all Microsoft products, with
particular emphasis on Windows Vista as the first version of the operating system designed
from the ground up to be secure. SDL specifies strict guidelines and processes for secure
software development. Sophisticated tools have been developed to scan everything from
source code to system binaries to network protocols for common security vulnerabilities.
Every time a new security vulnerability is discovered, it is analyzed, and mitigations are devel-
oped to address that potential attack vector. Windows Vista has now been in the market for
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