Operating system is Windows 7 or higher with UAC enabled. Calling process has admin rights, already confirmed by the UAC box.
I want to spawn a new Console window (cmd.exe) under user SYSTEM (don't ask why). I can do this interactively by using PsExec tool from Sysinternals or something similar, but I don't have the source code and I need to understand how this works.
I understand that I have to call CreateProcessAsUser() and that works fine with the first parameter (hToken) set to NULL, but now I need to know how to get the hToken. I understand that I can get such a token by calling LogonUser() - but not for SYSTEM. How would I get the token for SYSTEM?
I thought of using DuplicateTokenEx(), but that requires an original token, that I don't have.
Would I have to query the process list, find any SYSTEM process and try to get that token duplicated or something? I don't want to reverse engineer the PsExec tool or one of the others doing exactly this.
Typically you would install and launch a service, configured to log in as SYSTEM. You can then use OpenProcessToken and DuplicateTokenEx to make a copy of the token.
You will probably need to use SetTokenInformation to change the session ID for the token to match that of the interactive user. You need Act As Part Of the Operating System privilege to do that, so you should do this from inside the service itself. Once the duplicate token is ready to use, you can use DuplicateHandle to copy the handle into the administrative process, or (with the right options) you could launch the command shell directly from the service too.
alternative open the winlogon process with maximum permitted access, try to open the process token, (also with maximum permitted) and then try to duplicate this winlogon handle with impersonate rights. On win8.1 this will succeed. On others, you will need to temporary change the token dacl, with either a null or your own admin process token
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I have a non-interactive service running as a the privileged SYSTEM user on Windows machines, and I need it to launch a given executable as an elevated process.
I have managed to launch a child process as SYSTEM, using WTSGetActiveConsoleSessionId(), finding a system process and duplicating it's token. Similarly, I can launch a non-elevated process as a regular user. But I need to launch the process as the regular user, but with elevated privileges - so that I don't have to show UAC, but the process is running as the appropriate user.
I am not trying to bypass UAC - since the user already agreed to installing the service. I am trying to mitigate an inconvenience. I have found a similar, unanswered question - but asked again in hope of maybe getting an answer.
If you have a filtered token for the interactive user - for example, one retrieved via WTSQueryUserToken() - you can retrieve the unfiltered ("elevated") token by using the GetTokenInformation function with the TokenLinkedToken option.
I've read all the posts on Stack Overflow about CreateProcessAsUser and there are very few resolved questions, so I'm not holding my breath on this one. But it seems like I'm definitely missing something, so it might be easy.
The target OS is Windows XP. I have a service running as "Local System" from which I want to create a process running as a different user. For that user, I have the username and password, so LogonUser goes fine and I get a token for the user (in this case, an Administrator account.) I then try to use that token to call CreateProcessAsUser, but it fails because that token does not come with SeAssignPrimaryTokenPrivilege - however, it does have SeIncreaseQuotaPrivilege. (I used GetTokenInformation to dump all the privileges associated with that token.) According to the MSDN page for CreateProcessAsUser, you need both privileges in order to call CreateProcessAsUser successfully.
It also says you don't need the SeAssignPrimaryTokenPrivilege if the token you pass in to CreateProcessAsUser() is a "restricted version of the calling process' primary token", which I can create with CreateRestrictedToken(), but then it will be associated with the Local System user and not the target user I'm trying to run the process as.
So how would I create a logon token that is both a restricted version of the calling process' primary token, AND is associated with a different user? Thanks!
Note that there is no need for user interaction in here - it's all unattended - so there's no need to do stuff like grabbing WINSTA0, etc.
SE_ASSIGNPRIMARYTOKEN_NAME is a privilege you can enable in your process/thread with OpenProcessToken/OpenThreadToken+LookupPrivilegeValue+AdjustTokenPrivileges (It is easy to confuse this with TOKEN_ASSIGN_PRIMARY, and MSDN says you need both to attach a primary token to a process)
On this XP:SP2 machine, just calling LogonUser(...,LOGON32_LOGON_INTERACTIVE,...)+CreateProcessAsUser works just fine without messing with any privileges (Using a fake cmd.exe service, but that should not matter)
This quote on MSDN:
If the necessary privileges are not
already enabled, CreateProcessAsUser
enables them for the duration of the
call
and the fact that you are running as SYSTEM and should be able to enable any privilege leads me to believe that this assign primary stuff is not the problem.
From a Windows Service running on a Terminal Server (in global space), we would like to be able to start up a process running a windows application in a specific user's Terminal Server sessions.
How does one go about doing this?
The Scenerio: the windows service starts at boot time. After the user has logged into a Terminal Server user session, based on some criteria known only to the windows service, the windows service wants to start a process in the user's session running a windows application.
An example: We would like to display a 'Shutdown in 5 minutes' warning to the users. The windows service would detect this condition, and start up a process in each user session that starts the windows app that displays the warning. And, yes, I know there are other ways of displaying a warning dialog, this is the example, what we want to do is much more invasive.
You can use CreateProcessAsUser to do this - but it requires a bit of effort. I believe the following steps are the basic required procedure:
Get the user's session (WTSQuerySessionInformation).
Get a token for that user (WTSQueryUserToken).
Create a duplicate token for your use (DuplicateTokenEx).
Use the token to create an environment block (CreateEnvironmentBlock).
Launch the application with CreateProcessAsUser, using the block above.
You'll also want to make sure to clean up all of the appropriate handles, tokens, etc., after you've launched the process.
Really late reply but maybe somebody will find this helpful.
You can use PsExec to launch an application on a remote (or local) server inside a specified session by using the following command:
psexec \\COMPUTER_NAME -i SESSION_ID APPLICATION_NAME
Where SESSION_ID indicates the session id in which to launch the application.
You will need to know what sessions are active on the server and which session id maps to which user login. The following thread provides a nice code sample for this exact problem: How do you retrieve a list of logged-in/connected users in .NET?
Late reply but in the answer above DuplicateToken is not necessary since WTSQueryUserToken already returns a primary token.
I have a Windows executable that is launched from within a service by calling CreateProcessWithLogonW() with a set of specfied user details.
This works fine and the process starts as expected. However, when this process tries to launch other processes itself, currently just using CreateProcess() these start then die straight away - they are executables that require desktop access.
After reading up on Microsoft's article on CreateProcess() - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms682425(VS.85).aspx
I think can see why this is happening and it makes sense to an extent. CreateProcess() knows the calling process is impersonating a user so it uses it's parent process, which in this case is the Local System account. But of course anything run in the local system account doesn't have the access we need, so the launched process dies.
Oddly when I was previously using LogonUser() and CreateProcessAsUser() to launch the initial executable within the service, it worked fine. But I had to change this to CreateProcessWithLogonW() due to problems with not having the correct privileges.
Does anybody know of a solution to this? I've seen talk about this elsewhere on the web but not with any definite solution. It seems like I possibly need the token of the user i'm logging on with in CreateProcessWithLogonW() with so I can use it to launch the other processes later? But I have no way of getting hold of this token, can this be retreived for the current user in any way?
Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks :)
We solved the problem using some code that I found long-ago. The "copyright" section of one of the source modules contains the following:
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// CreateProcessAsUser.cpp
//
// Written by Valery Pryamikov (1999)
//
// Command line utility that executes a command under specified user identity
// by temporarily installing itself as a service.
//
// Based on Keith Brown's AsLocalSystem utility (http://www.develop.com/kbrown)
// Uses some code from Mike Nelson's dcomperm sample utility
// and from tlist sample (Microsoft Source Code Samples)
//
// Use:
// CreateProcessAsUser.exe [-i[nteractive]]|[-s[ystem]]|
// [-u"UserName" -d"DomainName" -p"Password"]|[-a"AppID"] command
// Command must begin with the process (path to the exe file) to launch
// -i process will be launched under credentials of the
// "Interactive User" (retrieved from winlogon\shell process)
// -a process will be launched under credentials of the user
// specified in "RunAs" parameter of AppID.
// -s process will be launched as local system
// -u -d -p process will be launched on the result token of the
// LogonUser(userName,domainName,password,LOGON32_LOGON_BATCH...)
//
// either (-s) or (-i) or (-a) or (-u -d -p) parameters must supplied
//
// Examples:
// CreateProcessAsUser -s cmd.exe
// CreateProcessAsUser -a"{731A63AF-2990-11D1-B12E-00C04FC2F56F}" winfile.exe
//
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Perhaps this information will yield hits within your Google searches - I attempted a few quick attempts but came up empty-handed.
We decomposed the internals into a set of API that yielded the results we needed.
Do you own the code launched using CreateProcessWithLogonW (and which in turn calls CreateProcess)? If you do not then you might need to perform IAT (or API) hooking on it (i.e. at run-time), as to substitute any calls to CreateProcess with an appropriate procedure that also uses CreateProcessWithLogonW or CreateProcessWithTokenW. See APIHijack, Detours.
After this is done, the child process may require access to HKCU. If you are not already doing this, you should load the profile of each impersonated user, once per user, before calling CreateProcessWithLogonW.
By default, CreateProcessWithLogonW
does not load the specified user
profile into the HKEY_USERS registry
key. This means that access to
information in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER
registry key may not produce results
that are consistent with a normal
interactive logon. It is your
responsibility to load the user
registry hive into HKEY_USERS before
calling CreateProcessWithLogonW, by
using LOGON_WITH_PROFILE, or by
calling the LoadUserProfile function.
Isn't there an option for services to allow them to interact with the desktop? If setting that option for your service is a possibility, that would probably be the simplest solution.
I'm assuming that this process is a service; that isn't specified in the question, but seems logical given that it is running as Local System account.
Where you're getting stuck isn't in CreateProcess, It's in CreateService. If you want your service to be able to interact with the desktop, you have to specify SERVICE_INTERACTIVE_PROCESS as one of the flags to the argument dwServiceType. This setting is inherited by child processes of the service.
You can also modify an existing service's setting by using the Services tool, select Properties for the service, click on the "Log On" tab, and select the check box "Allow service to interact with desktop".
I have an installation package that installs a service process that I create. I'd like to prompt the user for the username/password of the account that the service process should run under. I'd like to verify the the username/password combination are valid before continuing with the installation. I have a C DLL that I am using for special installation behavior, but I can't figure out how to use the Windows API to verify an account's credentials. I'd like to be able to support the same account name syntax used by the service control manager.
The function you want to use is LogonUser. You can even be extra-cool and specify the LOGON32_LOGON_SERVICE flag which checks to make sure the user has the appropriate permissions to run a service.
LogonUser is the canonical way to do this, though Microsoft somewhat discourages it.
I've implemented this using the LogonUser function as you guys have mentioned (by the way, this service requires WinXP SP2 or later so I'm not worried about the privilege issue). However, this isn't quite working as I had hoped. If I call QueryServiceConfig, lpServiceStartName is in the format ".\accountname". If I pass this string as is to LogonUser, it fails. I assume the portion before the '\' represents the machine on which the user belongs?
Also, if I call ChangeServiceConfig specifying "LocalSystem" and "" for the lpServiceStartName and lpPassword parameters respectively, this works fine. However, calling LogonUser with these parameters does not work.
I'd really like to use the same syntax that the SCM uses for the account names.