Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI)

Summary

This chapter was concerned with WMI security. It started with a discussion of the various layers of security that control WMI’s behavior and the tasks it can accomplish. Topics included WMI’s own security model, DCOM security, and its relationship with Windows 2000. The second part of the chapter considered more programmatic aspects of security, focusing on a selection of WMI objects that represent concepts, users, and SIDs. The final section of this chapter was devoted to a discussion of security descriptors, the core of Windows 2000 security, and the behavior of the various WMI objects that represent them. It presented scripts that report on and write to the security descriptors, protecting files and directories in an NTFS filesystem. ...