Category Archives: Windows 10

Debugging/DoSing System Settings (win10)

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Opening System Settings is a very common operation – one that allows users manage their computer and its settings, troubleshoot and fix stuff, and update the windows as well.

So… it turns out that the program itself (C:\Windows\ImmersiveControlPanel\SystemSettings.exe) has a built-in support for debugging; when launched, it checks if the following value in Registry is set:

  • HKCU\Control Panel\Debug = 1

If the value is present, the program will enter a never-ending loop waiting for a debugger to be attached to the program.

For an average user the program will basically freeze:

For the more advanced users, this is an opportunity to attach the debugger 🙂

URL schemes in win 10

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I was casually browsing the Regedit today (as you do) and noticed that the latest version of Windows introduced a lot of new URL schemes. I decided to extract all of them from the HKCR node and just drop them in one post. Googling around I couldn’t find similar list, so there you go…

There are nearly 200 of them… Historical evidence (lots of CVEs related to protocol handling) makes me believe there are possibly plenty of bugs waiting to be discovered in these.

Click the links and see what you get on your Win10 – not all of them will work obviously as they may not be ‘launchable’ from the browser, or maybe requiring proper arguments, but you can also use start command to automate it (start <protocol>).

Here’s the list: