Fighting Spyware with Mandatory Access Control in Microsoft Windows 7

It is widely agreed among computer science experts that spyware poses a dangerous threat to computer users' privacy. It is also widely agreed among these experts that mandatory access control (MAC) is a valuable security model that provides valuable security, namely in the fields of data confidentiality and data integrity (data authorization). Finally, and as of the writing of this book, Microsoft Windows arguably dominates the world's personal computer (PC) market, arguably holding approximately 91% of the market share of the client operating systems for usage on the Internet, and Microsoft Windows 7 is its most recent client version. But how can this valuable security model (MAC) be used to address data confidentiality issues in the world's most-used PC OS (Microsoft Windows)? The author Filipe Governa performs a market review, showing an overview of past work by briefly analyzing existing MAC implementations, with a deeper analysis of and strong focus on the most relevant for this work - Microsoft Windows Integrity Mechanism (WIM) in Microsoft Windows 7 -, and answers this question by developing and describing a concept for fighting tracking software types of spyware with MAC in Microsoft Windows 7 using WIM. The book is addressed to IT professionals in general and security experts and/or researchers in particular.