Patent ID: 7665143

Claim:
An operating system implemented on a hardware computing device, the operating system configured to establish and maintain a secure process, the operating system comprising: a user mode implemented on the hardware computing device; and a kernel mode implemented on the hardware computing device and configured to prohibit access by a non-secure user-mode process of the user mode to the secure process regardless of a security level of the non-secure user-mode process by: receiving a single system call from a user-mode process at the kernel mode, the single system call comprising a request to create a child process in the kernel mode and a set of parameters associated with attributes to be applied to the created child process, wherein the child process is the secure process; creating, by the kernel mode in response to the single system call, the child process within a trusted context, the creating including performing all actions needed to instantiate the child process in the kernel mode for the user-mode process in the user mode without receiving any further prompting from the user-mode process, including creating a handle to the created child process and a handle table associated with the handle, the handle table specifying a limited set of access rights prohibiting the user-mode process from accessing state of the created child process, the limited set of access rights being more restricted than a set of access rights already associated with the user-mode process, wherein the kernel mode enables access by the user-mode process to the secure process by providing the handle to the secure process to the user-mode process, wherein the handle is accompanied by a limited set of access rights to the secure process granted the user-mode process; returning, by the kernel mode after creating the child process, the handle of the created child process to the calling user-mode process; monitoring all access attempts to the created child process by non-secure user-mode processes in the user mode; detecting an attempt to access the child process by any non-secure user-mode process; and denying the attempted access to the child process beyond the limited set of access rights of the handle table associated with the handle of the child process regardless of the set of access rights associated with the non-secure user-mode process.