Customer Reviews

Windows NT Security: Programming Easy-To-Use Security Options with 3.5 Disk

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you want to understand the details of how NT implements security or need to build security into an application this book has the right stuff. This is not an administrators book. It describes the low level implementation of security in Windows NT. Great stuff. For an practical admin book take a look at Windows NT Security Guide by Stephen Sutton.

This book makes sense of the nightmare that is NT4.0 security. This book is for any developer who has to write applications that use NT security and finds the available documentation on MSDN incomprehensible.

In the first chapter of the book the author explains the NT security model and each of the major pieces including security identifiers, security descriptors, access tokens, and access control lists.

In the remaining chapters the author develops and documents a C++ class library that encapsulates the NT security functions. The class library by itself is worth the price of the book, as it makes using NT security easy. I highly recommend this book if you need to write secure software.

If you want to learn NT security APIs & programming, this is a must.

Nik Okuntseff explains the API well, however he should have left out the code to his C++ classes which takes up a good 35% of the book. Would have received 4 stars if he used plain easy-to-read 15 line or less example code.

This is probably the best book out there (well, actually, the ONLY book out there) for learing the basics of the NT security API -- however, its coverage is less than complete to say the least. For instance, it barely even mentions LSA!

Even though I read the synopsis of this book I was still surprised to find that the subject covers Windows NT and C language security conventions and not really very much about securing Windows NT.