Windows® Internals, Sixth Edition, Part 1

Whose ManagementChain attribute contains the value John Smith

Whose CommissionType attribute is Officer and whose PayGrade attribute is greater than 6 (that is, the rank of General Officer in the US military)

Windows does not include tools to view or edit conditional ACEs.

Account Rights and Privileges

Many operations performed by processes as they execute cannot be authorized through object access protection because they do not involve interaction with a particular object. For example, the ability to bypass security checks when opening files for backup is an attribute of an account, not of a particular object. Windows uses both privileges and account rights to allow a system administrator to control what accounts can perform security-related operations.

A privilege is the right of an account to perform a particular system-related operation, such as shutting down the computer or changing the system time. An account right grants or denies the account to which it’s assigned the ability to perform a particular type of logon, such as a local logon or interactive logon, to a computer.

A system administrator assigns privileges to groups and accounts using tools such as the Active Directory Users and Groups MMC snap-in for domain accounts or the Local Security Policy Editor (%SystemRoot%\System32\secpol.msc). You access the Local Security Policy Editor in the Administrative Tools folder of the Control Panel or the Start menu (if you’ve configured your Start menu to contain an Administrative Tools link). Figure 6-8 shows the User Rights Assignment configuration in the Local Security Policy Editor, which displays the complete list of privileges and account rights available on Windows. Note that the tool makes no distinction between privileges and account rights. However, you can differentiate between them because any user right that does not contain the words log on is an account privilege.

Figure 6-8. Local Security Policy Editor user rights assignment

Account Rights

Account rights are not enforced by the security reference monitor, nor are they stored in tokens. The function responsible for logon is LsaLogonUser. Winlogon, for example, calls the LogonUser API when a user logs on interactively to a computer, and LogonUser calls LsaLogonUser. LogonUser takes a parameter that indicates the type of logon being performed, which includes interactive, network, batch, service, and Terminal Server client.

In response to logon requests, the Local Security Authority (LSA) retrieves account rights assigned to a user from the LSA policy database at the time that a user attempts to log on to the system. LSA checks the logon type against the account rights assigned to the user account logging on and denies the logon if the account does not have the right that permits the logon type or it has the right that denies the logon type. Table 6-8 lists the user rights defined by Windows.

Windows applications can add and remove user rights from an account by using the LsaAddAccountRights and LsaRemoveAccountRights functions, and they can determine what rights are assigned to an account with LsaEnumerateAccountRights.

Table 6-8. Account Rights

User Right

Role

Deny logon locally,

Allow logon locally

Used for interactive logons that originate on the local machine

Deny logon over the network,

Allow logon over the network

Used for logons that originate from a remote machine

Deny logon through Terminal Services,

Allow logon through Terminal Services

Used for logons through a Terminal Server client

Deny logon as a service,

Allow logon as a service

Used by the service control manager when starting a service in a particular user account

Deny logon as a batch job,

Allow logon as a batch job

Used when performing a logon of type batch

Privileges

The number of privileges defined by the operating system has grown over time. Unlike user rights, which are enforced in one place by the LSA, different privileges are defined by different components and enforced by those components. For example, the debug privilege, which allows a process to bypass security checks when opening a handle to another process with the OpenProcess Windows API, is checked for by the process manager. Table 6-9 is a full list of privileges, and it describes how and when system components check for them.

When a component wants to check a token to see whether a privilege is present, it uses the PrivilegeCheck or LsaEnumerateAccountRights APIs if running in user mode and SeSinglePrivilegeCheck or SePrivilegeCheck if running in kernel mode. The privilege-related APIs are not account-right aware, but the account-right APIs are privilege-aware.