How does Windows knows a particular software is an AV?

Question

First, I did some GoogleFu and came up with nothing.

My question is: How does Windows 10 know things like McAfee, Symantec, AVG, etc are antivirus solutions?

My assumption is that they set a registry key or something similar but I cannot seem to find documentation on this.

Thanks in advanced for any help.

Answer 1

They need to register themselves with WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation), and store some information in the WMI repository. See here for details on how it works.