How was User Account Control (UAC) implemented in previous versions of Windows, particularly in terms of access control lists and permission inheritance? What differences exist in these mechanisms compared to current systems, and how do you think they impact modern setups? Any similar experiences out there? I’d also like a comparison in terms of security vulnerabilities and mitigation strategies.
How does UAC and access control work in Windows 7?
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A couple of years ago, I had to migrate an internal tool written in .NET 2.0 to a machine running Windows 7. At first, everything worked under the administrator profile, but when I enabled UAC, I found that many file accesses under `C:\Program Files` and registry entries (`HKLM\Software`) were failing with access denied errors. The solution was to create manifests to elevate privileges only where absolutely necessary and move configuration data to a user folder (`%LOCALAPPDATA%`). I also reviewed the ACLs of the directories involved: before Windows Vista, inheritance was more permissive, and users in the "Users" group had write permissions in several places, whereas with UAC, inheritance breaks, and explicit permissions are required. This difference forced me to redesign the data storage architecture to prevent non-privileged users from writing to protected paths, which ultimately improved the product's security.
How Windows 7 handles permission inheritance when a low-level process spawns one with elevated privileges intrigues me—does the token fully regenerate, or does it retain some reference to the original token? Also, what practical differences do you notice in audit logs between that version and more recent ones?