Program to Restrict User Access

I 开发者_运维百科have had this project in mind for a while but have had trouble on how to go about doing it.

What I want to code is a security application that will temporarily restrict the access of the user to just one or two selected applications.

Let's say you're bringing your laptop to a situation in which many people will be using it. You only want them to be able to browse the internet and not play games / listen to itunes / look through and mess with your files and so on. You select a program, let's say Firefox in this case, and then a master password. Only Firefox can be used and when the user tries to click outside of Firefox a prompt will appear asking for the password. Obviously CTRL+ALT+DEL would need to be restricted for this too.

I have considerable experience with Java and web dev languages along with some experience in C. However, the only applications I have coded thus far are homework style desktop applications, this seems a lot more "real world" and I don't know how to begin or what language to code it in.

What I was thinking was having the user select the .exe that he wanted to be available, and any time a new .exe was launched it would be checked to see if it was on the available list of .exes (so if Firefox.exe was enabled, Steam.exe would be force closed) but this doesn't seem a very good way of doing it.

Could you give me some pointers? I think this will need doing in C/C++ as it will be beyond the capabilites of Java. I have tried some research and I'm not asking for someone to do this for me, just a general idea how to do this properly rather than in a hacky way. Coding for Windows 7.

If you have a Professional, Ultimate, or Enterprise, start with Group Policy. (Start->gpedit.msc). There are settings there to restrict which programs can be launched from Explorer and prevent opening of Task Manager. Note that tis doesn;t help with launching programs from other programs, however.