Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0 Resource Kit

IIS 7.0 Core Components

In this section, we will look at IIS 7.0 core components and their role in process activation and request processing.

HTTP.sys

HTTP.sys is the protocol listener that listens for HTTP and HTTPS requests. HTTP.sys was introduced in IIS 6.0 as an HTTP-specific protocol listener for HTTP requests. In IIS 7.0, HTTP.sys also includes support for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), which Lsass.exe provided in IIS 6.0.

HTTP.sys is a kernel-mode device driver for HTTP protocol stack. It is part of the networking subsystem of the Windows operating systems. Beginning with IIS 6.0, this kernel-mode driver replaced Windows Sockets API (Winsock), which was a user-mode component that previous versions of IIS used to receive HTTP requests and send ...