YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Windows parallel DLL loading also defensively disables itself for a process if it finds some NT DLL functions have been hooked https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42789199/why-there-are-t...

The world could use more hot patching. Now that AI upends computer security, getting software patched in a timely fashion is more important than ever, and having to reboot/restart the process or computer to get those updates is more of a problem than it was before.

At a previous job I wrote a docker build for patching individual Java class files on top of a monolithic docker image. This was not runtime patching, but allowed a single layer that was only a few kilobytes to be deployed quickly in emergency situations.

Interestingly, it had similar constraints and checked them at build time: it could not be a public ABI change and only one patch at a time.

It’s like mixing two different hot sauces, ymmv.

Interesting framing that hooking functions is considered “rogue” by Microsoft, or something you’re “not authorized” to do, when Microsoft themselves makes the detours library and never framed it like this before.

Also, missing from this explanation: hooks are usually applied per process, from user space. The code pages in a dynamic library are CoW’d from the shared page when you write to them to apply a patch.

Does the Windows Update work similarly, or does it somehow modify the original, shared page, affecting all processes? Does a hook in a single process disable hot patching on the entire system?

It's been at least 20 years, and Microsoft's blogging platform still doesn't support previous/next post links. Makes it goddamn hard to read the prior series about hot patching if it's not at the top of the blog.