Invoke Blue Screen of Death using Managed Code

I would have to say no. You'd have to p/invoke and interact with a driver or other code that lives in kernel space. .NET code lives far removed from this area, although there has been some talk about managed drivers in future versions of Windows. Just wait a few more years and you can crash away just like our unmanaged friends.

As far as I know a real BSOD requires failure in kernel mode code. Vista still has BSOD's but they're less frequent because the new driver model has less drivers in kernel mode. Any user-mode failures will just result in your application being killed.

You can't run managed code in kernel mode. So if you want to BSOD you need to use PInvoke. But even this is quite difficult. You need to do some really fancy PInvokes to get something in kernel mode to barf.

But among the thousands of SO users there is probably someone who has done this :-)

The keyboard thing is probably a good option, but if you need to do it by code, continue reading...

You don't really need anything to barf, per se, all you need to do is find the KeBugCheck(Ex) function and invoke that.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms801640.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms801645.aspx

For manually initiated crashes, you want to used 0xE2 (MANUALLY_INITIATED_CRASH) or 0xDEADDEAD (MANUALLY_INITIATED_CRASH1) as the bug check code. They are reserved explicitly for that use.

However, finding the function may prove to be a bit tricky. The Windows DDK may help (check Ntddk.h) - I don't have it available at the moment, and I can't seem to find decisive info right now - I think it's in ntoskrnl.exe or ntkrnlpa.exe, but I'm not sure, and don't currently have the tools to verify it.

You might find it easier to just write a simple C++ app or something that calls the function, and then just running that.

Mind you, I'm assuming that Windows doesn't block you from accessing the function from user-space (.NET might have some special provisions). I have not tested it myself.

I do not know if it really works and I am sure you need Admin rights, but you could set the CrashOnCtrlScroll Registry Key and then use a SendKeys to send CTRL+Scroll Lock+Scroll Lock.

But I believe that this HAS to come from the Keyboard Driver, so I guess a simple SendKeys is not good enough and you would either need to somehow hook into the Keyboard Driver (sounds really messy) or check of that CrashDump has an API that can be called with P/Invoke.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/244139

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt\Parameters
Name: CrashOnCtrlScroll
Data Type: REG_DWORD
Value: 1
Restart