Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Anantha P Ganjam

Roberto Anthony Franco

John Green Bedworth

Peter T Brundrett

Roland Tokumi

Marc Adam Silbey

Venkatraman V Kudallur

Shankar Ganesh

Jianrong Gu

Jeremiah S Epling

David Andrew Ross

Kurt James Schmucker

Bogdan M Tepordei

Daniel Sie

Vidya Nallathimmayyagari

Anthony T Chor

Mara B Patton

Dean J Hachamovitch

Andrew S Zeigler

Jessica A Hitchcock

A method and system for locking down a local machine zone associated with a network browser is provided. Placing the local machine zone in a lockdown mode provides stricter security settings that are applied to active content attempting to publish within a local page open in the network browser. The stricter setting are provided in a new set of registry keys that correspond to the lockdown mode of the local machine zone. The original security settings remain unchanged so that other systems and applications functionality that depends on the original security settings remains unaffected for the local machine zone. A user may also selectively allow active content to render despite the local machine zone being locked down.

Security context lockdown

Various embodiments enable detection of third party content sources that may pose a privacy risk to a user. In at least some embodiments, webpages navigated to via a browser can be processed to identify third party content sources that provide content for the webpages. Data may be stored to relate the third party content sources to webpages in which the third party content is encountered. The data may then be analyzed to determine when a particular third party is in a position to observe browsing habits of a user. Responsive to determining a privacy risk, notification may be output in a variety of ways to inform a user of potentially risky content. In at least some other embodiments, notification can be made by way of a user interface instrumentality that is automatically presented to a user to inform the user of a potentially risky third party content source.

Web page privacy risk detection

In various embodiments, applications that are configured to interact with the Internet in some way are executed in a restricted process with a reduced privilege level that can prohibit the application from accessing portions of an associated computing device. For example, in some embodiments, the restricted process can prohibit applications from read and write access to portions of a system's computer-readable media, such as the hard disk, that contains administrative data and settings information and user data and settings. In these embodiments, a special portion of the disk, termed a 'containment zone', is designated and used by applications in this restricted process.

Running internet applications with low rights

System and method for local machine zone lockdown with relation to a network browser

Growing community of inventors

Sammamish, WA, United States of America

Anantha P Ganjam