Windows® Internals, Sixth Edition, Part 1

Winlogon then looks in the registry at the value HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\Current Version\Winlogon\Userinit and creates a process to run whatever the value of that string is. (This value can be several .EXEs separated by commas.) The default value is Userinit.exe, which loads the user profile and then creates a process to run whatever the value of HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\Current Version\Winlogon\Shell is, if that value exists. That value does not exist by default. If it doesn’t exist, Userinit.exe does the same for HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\Current Version\Winlogon\Shell, which defaults to Explorer.exe. Userinit then exits (which is why Explorer.exe shows up as having no parent when examined in Process Explorer). For more information on the steps followed during the user logon process, see Chapter 13, “Startup and Shutdown,” in Part 2.

Assured Authentication

A fundamental problem with password-based authentication is that passwords can be revealed, or stolen, and used by malicious third parties. New in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008/R2 is a mechanism that tracks the authentication strength of how a user authenticated with the system, which allows objects to be protected from access if a user did not authenticate securely. (Smartcard authentication is considered to be a stronger form of authentication than password authentication.)

On systems that are joined to a domain, the domain administrator can specify a mapping between an Object Identifier (OID), which is a unique numeric string representing a specific object type, on a certificate used for authenticating a user (such as on a smartcard or hardware security token) and a Security ID (SID) that is placed into the user’s access token when the user successfully authenticates with the system. An ACE in a DACL on an object can specify such a SID be part of a user’s token in order for the user to gain access to the object. Technically, this is known as a group claim. In other words, the user is claiming membership in a particular group, which is allowed certain access rights on specific objects, with the claim based upon the authentication mechanism. This feature is not enabled by default, and it must be configured by the domain administrator in a domain with certificate-based authentication.

Assured Authentication builds upon existing Windows security features in a way that provides a great deal of flexibility to IT administrators and anyone concerned with enterprise IT security. The enterprise decides which OIDs to embed in the certificates it uses for authenticating users and the mapping of particular OIDs to Active Directory universal groups (SIDs). A user’s group membership can be used to identify whether a certificate was used during the logon operation. Different certificates can have different issuance policies and, thus, different levels of security, which can be used to protect highly sensitive objects (such as files or anything else that might have a security descriptor).

Authentication protocols (APs) retrieve OIDs from certificates during certificate-based authentication. These OIDs must be mapped to SIDs, which are in turn processed during group membership expansion, and placed in the access token. The mapping of OID to universal group is specified in Active Directory.

As an example, an organization might have several certificate issuance policies with the names Contractor, Full Time Employee, and Senior Management, which map to the universal groups Contractor-Users, FTE-Users, and SM-Users, respectively. A user named Abby has a smartcard with a certificate issued using the Senior Management issuance policy, and when she logs in using her smartcard, she receives an additional group membership (which is represented by a SID in her access token) indicating that she is a member of the SM-Users group. Permissions can be set on objects (using an ACL) such that only members of the FTE-Users or SM-Users group (identified by their SIDs within an ACE) are granted access. If Abby logs in using her smartcard, she can access those objects, but if she logs in with just her user name and password (without the smartcard), she cannot access those objects because she will not have either the FTE-Users or SM-Users group in her access token. A user named Toby who logs in with a smartcard that has a certificate issued using the Contractor issuance policy would not be able to access an object that has an ACE requiring FTE-Users or SM-Users group membership.

Biometric Framework for User Authentication