Security Webcasts and Screencasts

Applications that unnecessarily require administrative privileges are among the biggest obstacles to secure desktop deployment, and this is not likely to change for Windows Vista deployments. Designing applications to install and run under the Least-Privilege User Account (LUA) can help to address this problem to a certain degree, but some applications can still break when run with a limited user account. Identifying specific causes for these "LUA bugs" has traditionally been very difficult, and applying the fixes often exposes other unnecessary risks. In this webcast, we introduce LUA Buglight, a new tool that quickly identifies the specific causes of “LUA bugs”, which you can remediate at the code level or at deployment with carefully tailored system tweaks.

Windows Installer 4.0 in Windows Vista includes new features that allow application developers to take full advantage of User Account Control (UAC) when installing, updating, and uninstalling software. In this presentation, we cover the new installation features that specifically relate to User Account Control, such as marking a package as UAC-compliant, taking advantage of UAC patching, and adding the “shield” icon to your user interface. We also address common UAC debugging issues pertaining to application installation and servicing.

In this session, we discuss the enhancements to the digital certificate infrastructure in both the Microsoft Windows Server code-named “Longhorn” and Windows Vista operating systems.  We cover Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS) in Windows Server “Longhorn” and introduce new technologies such as Online Revocation Services, which uses the Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) responder to verify the validity of certificates. We demonstrate the new X.509 certificate enrollment APIs in Windows Vista that enable developers to develop robust and secure digital certificate-aware applications more easily. We also discuss additional features such as Credential Roaming Services, Network Device Enrollment Services, and Web Enrollment Services.

In this webcast, we explore Windows User Account Control (UAC), a new security feature in the Windows Vista operating system. Learn how User Account Control reduces the security exposure and the attack surface of the operating system by running all user processes with non-administrative privileges and requiring user consent for elevated operations. By helping ensure that users do not accidentally make computer or file modifications that cannot be easily reversed, UAC reduces the cost of managing desktops and the overall total cost of ownership (TCO). We provide best practices for deploying and managing User Account Control, ensuring compatibility with existing applications, and coding to take advantage of User Account Control protection.

Windows Vista's UAC feature is designed to minimize security risks by running most applications under a standard user token, lessening the risk that an attacker could gain admin rights to the machine.  This is a great step forward for users, but it may leave developers wondering what to do when their apps do really need admin rights to complete a task.
Ian Griffiths to the rescue, with another screencast showing how to structure an app to enable certain admin tasks to run in an elevated context.

Windows Vista's UAC feature is designed to minimize security risks by running most applications under a standard user token, lessening the risk that an attacker could gain admin rights to the machine. UAC allows executables to specify what privilege level they require -- if an app doesn't provide a specification, it will be run in the context of a standard user, but UAC will provide some virtualization features to make it appear as though certain admin tasks succeeded.
Ian Griffiths presents another screencast that covers the default virtualization behavior, and then shows how to write a UAC manifest to specify a desired privelege level, for both native win32 apps and managed .NET apps.

Learn the new WSS 3.0 model for configuring access to a WSS site collection.

Learn how to configure a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 site to use the ASP.NET 2.0 Forms Authentication Provider.