bInheritHandle

bInheritHandle is a member of the Windows SECURITY_ATTRIBUTES structure. It indicates whether a handle created with that security attributes is inheritable by child processes. When set to TRUE, the handle can be inherited by a new process if the process creating the child also enables handle inheritance.

In practice, bInheritHandle is specified when creating objects such as pipes, file mappings, events, or other kernel objects. If you want a child process to be able to use a handle to these objects, you typically create the handle with bInheritHandle set to TRUE.

For a child process to receive inheritable handles, the caller must also enable inheritance at process creation by setting bInheritHandles to TRUE in CreateProcess (or the equivalent process creation routine). If bInheritHandles is FALSE, no handles are inherited, even if individual handles are marked inheritable. In some scenarios, developers use this combination to pass specific handles to the child while keeping others private.

Security considerations are important when using handle inheritance. Inheritable handles can expose resources to less-privileged processes, so they should be enabled only for handles that truly need to be shared. It is common to close or avoid inheritable handles in the parent process once they are no longer needed, to reduce potential risks.

See also: CreateProcess, SECURITY_ATTRIBUTES, handle inheritance, DuplicateHandle.