Control alt delete why

Linux has some rudimentary low-level support for this capability but it never seems to have ascended into an end user feature of any consequence. No application can trap the SAK combination because long before any code runs that lets userspace applications fiddle with the key presses, the kernel has noticed that the SAK has been pressed and short-circuited to a path that just handles this special case. In Windows when you press the SAK it forcibly summons a separate desktop, which you can think of as being kind of like a separate X server process.

This desktop is "owned" by the System user, roughly equivalent to Unix root, so anyone with permission to tamper with it could just have replaced the entire OS kernel or whatever they wanted. Does it explain why different keyboard sequences were chosen? I'm not sure. It shows why there is more than a single such keyboard sequence in Linux and what the differences between them are see Andrew Morton's explanation , but I couldn't find a clear answer on why was one chosen over the other and why different kernel builds might use different SAK combinations.

I can only suspect that it boils down to personal preference of their respected authors. This key sequence is called the secure attention sequence SAS.

By entering this key sequence, you are basically "proving" to yourself that it is Windows that is accepting your input. This guards against a malicious program intercepting your login credentials by creating a fake username and password form. Of course, this assumes that Winlogon is not compromised, and it may so happen that Winlogon has been tampered with so that this measure can be bypassed.

If you own the computer, reboot it into safe mode and clean up any malware on it. If your company owns the computer, contact your system administrator. If the question is "why these three keys" then I would say because they are hard to push and a mistake is therefore hard as people have said. If the question is "why does Windows now use it" then I do not know, maybe because user where familiar with it it was chosen.

You will need to ask the person s that made that decision, I am fairly sure the actual keys pressed are arbitrary but now I am thinking it may be a low level hardware interrupt.

Another part of the reason - AFAIK - is to be found when considering the choice of key combination: It is very difficult to press all of Ctrl, Alt and Del at the same time with a single hand; and it is also very unlikely that all 3 keys will be pressed at the same time by something hitting the keyboard, or by you sort of banging on it etc.

As David Bradley choose this combination to trigger a soft reboot Wikipedia , it was important for it not to be triggered by mistake. This caught on for things like bringing up a user login prompt; the idea is to make you demonstrate your intention by explicitly deciding to press an "difficult" key combination e. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.

Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Asked 8 years, 6 months ago. Active 5 months ago. Viewed 79k times. Does it improve security in any way, and if so, how?

Improve this question. Cole Tobin 2 2 silver badges 10 10 bronze badges. Count Zero Count Zero 2, 3 3 gold badges 15 15 silver badges 14 14 bronze badges. Bradley never intended to make the shortcut available to customers, nor did he expect it to enter the pop lexicon. It was meant for him and his fellow coders, for whom every second counted. The team managed to finish Acorn on schedule. In the fall of , the IBM PC hit shelves—a homely gray box beneath a monitor that spit out green lines of type.

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