Mark Russinovich - Windows Internals: Including Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista

To Jim Allchin, our OS and rock star

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 development, you will find lots of detailed analysis and examples to help improve your understanding 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 storage. 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 industryand Microsoft in particularhas 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 hurricane. 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 mistakebotnets 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 developed to address that potential attack vector. Windows Vista has now been in the market for two years, and it is by far the most secure version of Windows. Some industry analysts have pointed out that it is, in fact, the most secure general purpose operating system shipping today.

The Windows team has continued to innovate over the past few years. Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, and Hyper-V are all major accomplishments and great successesas well as great additions to the Windows family of products.

Frankly, I can't think of a more exciting and challenging topic. Nor can I think of a more authoritative and well-written book. David, Mark, and Alex have done a thorough job of dissecting the Windows architecture and providing diagnostic tools for hands-on learning. I hope you enjoy reading and learning about Windows as much as we all enjoy working on it.

Ben Fathi Corporate Vice President, Windows Core Development Microsoft Corporation