Running as Admin on Windows campaign
UPDATE (December 30, 2004).
As Michael Howard said in his Code Secure article on MSDN;“Running with an administrative account is dangerous to the health of your computer and your data”. Nowadays, the major threats to computers come from user interaction with the Web through tools like browsers and e-mail clients. On the other hand, there are non-user interaction attacks, but for these kind of malware, there are several security tools like firewalls (Windows XP SP2 and many others), anti-spyware, anti-virus and so on. That said, what happens when you are running under a normal user account and you or some application need admin rights? Well, in the first place, you should follow some guidelines with your working environment and your application usage habits as well. Take a look at the following list or if you have any good (or whatever) reason to run under administrative privileges and you still need a safer way to read your mail, browse the web or do instant messaging, jump to the next section “Running safely as an administrator” to check out the list of tools and references that promotes or at least gives some help on this working style. Runing as Non-admin links: Here are some good links on how to run your environment without admin privileges.
Running safely as an administrator So you need to do some daily risky task like the aforementioned and your other tasks as an admin? Well, it happen that Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 and later already support this capability using something called “restricted tokens”. Basically, all the following links, works on this principle called SAFER and this enable a user to run code at a lower privilege without having the user enter credential information when the application starts. Let’s see what tools and articles we have that contribute and implement this feature:
- RunAsAdmin Explorer Shim by Valery Pryamikov: An explorer shim that make your shell run with reduced rights (like normal user or even untrusted) and show an icon in lower right corner that could be used for easily starting program with administrator level of rights (without requiring to re-logon or re-type the password).
- DropMyRights tool by Michael Howard: A command line tool that launch your risky application after removing from the current user's token various privileges and SIDs.
- Explorer tool based on DropMyRights by Hofi: Another shell like approach but you can run any program or file with its associated handler in a safer context, just right clicking on files and choosing between the 3 safer launch levels.
So if you are (like me :o) rather lazy for not running as non-admin, as well as to another part of your nerd buddies that are running as non-admin, you may consider this last alternatives for running safely (or mostly) under an administrator account your risky software. I will further post of new tools and news about this topic. UPDATE NOTE: It should be clear that this approach is less safe than the “Running as non-admin” strategy (see links on that section) and whenever possible, this should be the way to go on every risky environment (almost every kind of computing system). The topic of this post just adds some insight on those scenarios that requires this kind of usage (despite your own laziness/hassle to implement a non-admin approach). Have a great time in Happy Year's eve and may the source be with you J.