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Visual Studio
// Steve McLenithan
Family Guy: Season 2 - Episode 8
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Dear All,
I am developing an application for Windows 2000 using VC++ Version 6.0. I need to disable the F8 option so that user may not be able to boot the system in safe mode.
Is there any way out to disable safe mode option, i.e disable F8 key.
Thanks in advance.
Regards,
Rohit Dhamija
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Rohit Divas wrote:
Is there any way out to disable safe mode option, i.e disable F8 key.
God, I hope not! If you manage to disable that I'll have to hunt you down and break both of your knees. I'll leave you with functioning fingers, though, as you'll need them to correct the error of your ways.
Any application that meddles with the safe operation of the OS is trash by definition, and Safe Mode is critical to the reliable operation (and recovery) of the system. I can think of no legitimate reason for breaking it, unless your application is malicious by design.
"Your village called -
They're missing their idiot."
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hi,
Q) :-DSafe Mode is critical to the reliable operation (and recovery) of the system....
Ans) I know this very well, but our s.w required this feature (it's a security s.w) so i wanted to enquire that is there any way out to disable F8 by some means...
Anyways thanks for your reply Roger,
Rohit
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I'm still suspicious of your motives... I have to fix the damned things when they go bad. Invoking safe mode occurs very early in the boot process, right about the time that the BIOS hands off to the bootstrap loader on the MBR. That's going to be hard to catch, and may require replacing an interrupt handler at a very low level; I'm not sure how you might go about that, since you're quite limited in what you can do until the OS actually loads and takes control of the hardware.
"Your village called -
They're missing their idiot."
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No dear ,
i am developing a anti-hacking/security s.w....
I have seen this option in an application provided by
http://www.stormcoast-fortress.net/
but donot know how it works !
Rohit
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Interesting challenge. I know there are programs that intercept keystrokes; you can probably find a few here on CP. But loading such a routine early enough in the boot process to be effective might be tough. Perhaps a Run= entry in the registry, like so many viruses use, would be called for in this case. Have you looked at redirecting the STDIN, CIN and CON devices to your program? DOS used to allow this using the || or > characters in a batch file, but I don't know if modern Windows versions still support this.
"Your village called -
They're missing their idiot."
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What's the point - boot-time security is a hardware problem really. Disabling safemode doesn't help if you can still stick a CD or floppy in and boot from other media.
And no, nothing in usermode executes early enough to catch this. In fact nothing in kernel mode really does either, in the conventional sense. To tinker with this behavior you would have to patch NTLDR or one of the things it calls, NTDETECT.COM or the optional NTBOOTDD.SYS.
*shudder* Real-mode interrupt handling - ick. You were right with your first response, when you told him it was a bad idea.
-Blake
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Blake Coverett wrote:
You were right with your first response, when you told him it was a bad idea.
Shhhhh. I was trying to suggest a solution that might work well enough, while still letting me with my lightning fast fingers get in there and repair the machine before the key is disabled.
"Your village called -
They're missing their idiot."
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Blake Coverett wrote:
stick a CD or floppy
It is fairly easy to disable both of those, either through software or a "hardware lock"
"Committee--a group of men who individually can do nothing but as a group decide that nothing can be done." - Fred Allen
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I didn't say it was difficult, just that it was a hardware problem not a software problem.
And how exactly do you suggest disabling those via software? You can change the BIOS boot options, but they can always be changed back. You can put a password on the BIOS, but it can always be disabled by shorting the appropriate jumper. Physically control of the hardware is the only way to prevent attacks based on booting off external media.
Given physical access to a computer one can always break in.
(The only class of solution that prevents that seriously damages usability and uptime: encryption of the disk at the block level with decryption based on a key provided by a trusted person at boot time, combined with intrusion detection that automatically shuts down the system, loosing that key in the process.)
-Blake
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Blake Coverett wrote:
disabling those via software
By using the Windows service floplock.exe see Q185704 , the source code is supplied, you can disable the floppy, COM ports and I believe the CD. These can be done in the BIOS as well, of course, which can then be password protected.
100% security is not possible, but using an industrial enclosure, which has floppy, CD, and power switch behind a lockable panel, plus the case itself being locked, the box then securly fastened to an imovable object. Plus monitoring the PC on the network for a reboot.
"Committee--a group of men who individually can do nothing but as a group decide that nothing can be done." - Fred Allen
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Ted Ferenc wrote:
By using the Windows service floplock.exe see Q185704 , the source code is supplied, you can disable the floppy, COM ports and I believe the CD. These can be done in the BIOS as well, of course, which can then be password protected.
Floplock does not disable the floppy or anything else at boot time, only after Windows is entirely booted and user-mode services are running.
The BIOS, and passwords on it I already addressed in my last post. It is of no use unless the hardware is physically secured.
Ted Ferenc wrote:
100% security is not possible, but using an industrial enclosure, which has floppy, CD, and power switch behind a lockable panel, plus the case itself being locked, the box then securly fastened to an imovable object. Plus monitoring the PC on the network for a reboot.
*grins* Thank you, that was exactly what I said in the first place. It is not a hard problem to solve in hardware, but it can not be solved in software.
-Blake
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Blake Coverett wrote:
solve in hardware,
Perhaps we should start some flame wars about the insecurity of a stand alone Windws PCs
After all, if you simply steal the PC or hard drive, that is an effective way of breaking security. But disabling BIOS and floppy, CD serial port, USB ports does go a long way to making it secure.
I have always said I can easily guarantee totally security on a PC!! Simply remove the power cable!
"Committee--a group of men who individually can do nothing but as a group decide that nothing can be done." - Fred Allen
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Ted Ferenc wrote:
about the insecurity of a stand alone Windws PCs
No, you miss the point. All of what I said about boot time security and physical access to the machine applies regardless of the operating system installed on the machine. This has been a well understood fact in security circles before there was a Windows.
-Blake
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Blake Coverett wrote:
boot time security
I totally agree, you just need on OS that does not and can not boot from a disk. even that could be argued is not 100% secure.
"Committee--a group of men who individually can do nothing but as a group decide that nothing can be done." - Fred Allen
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How can I reinstall the Windows XP Boot loader. My laptop currentl dool boots linux and windows. I'm using Lilo as my bootloader. I'm removing linux from my laptop so I need to reinstall the windows boot loader. fdisk is missing from XP so I assume there is a new way
Jared
jparsons@jparsons.org
www.prism.gatech.edu/~gte477n
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Can you install just the bootloader? The best way it just to remove Lilo and it should default back to the XP bootloader. In fact, I think that's the only thing I learned how to do in Linux 
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That's how I got XP to boot back using Mandrake 9.X just simply removed Lilo..There may be a restore previous flag I'm not sure but I do know thats how I did it.
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jparsons wrote:
How can I reinstall the Windows XP Boot loader. My laptop currentl dool boots linux and windows. I'm using Lilo as my bootloader. I'm removing linux from my laptop so I need to reinstall the windows boot loader. fdisk is missing from XP so I assume there is a new way
Going from hazy memory, but here goes. Boot from your XP CD, go into the recovery console and run fixmbr. There is some other fix* program you may have to run as well. HTH.
Michael Martin
Australia
"I suspect I will be impressed though, I am easy."
- Paul Watson 21/09/2003
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All knowing gurus, 
I have a rather strange question... I have an XP desktop machine connected to ADSL via it's LAN, and a 386 laptop, with no network card, only a modem, and Windows 3.11 (nostalgia!  ). I would like to get the laptop online, so I've tried setting up XP's dial up server, and Trumpet Winsock on the 3.11 machine. I have some freaky equipment (an old ISDN Quattrovox, if you must know  ) between the two computers' modems, to act like an outside line. All good so far... But when I try and dial up on the 3.11 machine it dials and makes all the noises then falls flat when it's trying to authenticate. What could be the problem? And if I can get it to dial up, will the laptop be able to surf the internet, or will it only see the XP machine? This is mainly a fun (geeky?) experiment with a laptop someone gave to me today instead of throwing away, so it's not critical that it works...
Thanks in advance 
If I sound a bit incoherent, i'm almost falling asleep 
Paul 
That demands capital punishment!! Death by a herd of marauding Bobs! - Ryan Binns
modified 18-Jul-18 11:59am.
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IIRC, Trumpet Winsock always was buggy, and its TCP/IP stack had some serious problems on following standards.
Why don't you remove Windows 3.11 from the 386 machine and use a Linux (if you have only 4MB RAM maybe at runlevel 2 to save some memory)? This way you could use your old machine with a modern OS.
Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet.
-- Bruce Schneier
By the way, dog_spawn isn't a nickname - it is my name with an underscore instead of a space. -- dog_spawn
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Daniel Turini wrote:
Linux
I'll maybe do that as a last resort
Paul
That demands capital punishment!! Death by a herd of marauding Bobs! - Ryan Binns
modified 18-Jul-18 11:59am.
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