Mandatory Integrity Control

Ever wondered what lies beneath the covers of Protected Mode Internet Explorer? Short answer, long explanation: mandatory integrity control (MIC). Recap: Mandatory Integrity Control During the development of Vista the developers at Microsoft felt that the traditional ACL-based mechanism to control access to system resources was not enough. The ACL model grants all processes run by a user specific permissions on system resources like files and registry keys. While this is a powerful thing and well-suited for “normal” applications, programs like Internet Explorer are under much heavier attack by malware than, say, your average text editor. Once an IE process has been corrupted by exploiting a security hole, the attacking software can write to any location on the system the currently logged on user has access to. Not good.