Develop Reference

Auto Start WinForms Application With Admin Permissions On Non-Admin Account

I've been wrestling with this issue for a few days and can't find any posts that solve it for me. Maybe what I want isn't possible.
We have developed a WinForms application for internal use at our company.
Most employees do not have admin access in windows.
Our application requires admin access to the machine and needs to automatically start when the user logs on.
Here's what I've tried:
1) Putting a Shortcut in the Startup folder
I can get the app to automatically launch (using a relauncher), but it still requires an admin to be at the computer on every restart (to enter the password).
2) Registry Key
I created a Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run registry key to automatically start the application. Whether I run the relauncher or the app itself, UAC demands a password on every restart (or relogin).
3) Scheduled Task
I created a scheduled task to automatically start the app on logon using admin permissions on the machine (under use the following account). I also checked the 'Run with highest privileges' box. UAC still pops up on every restart.
4) Windows Service
I tried to run the app as a windows service, but it has a user interface (which is disabled by windows services).
5) Disable UAC for Specific Program
It looks like you can disable UAC for a specific program but that involves downloading the Application Compatibility Toolkit, creating some kind of database, etc. I'd very much prefer that our IT staff wouldn't have to do that at every machine. At this point, it's probably my only option.
It seems like an admin should be able to install an application so that it runs automatically without a prompt. Am I missing a way to do this?

You should make split your program into a non-admin UI, which runs on user startup, and an admin service, which performs the administrative tasks.
To run admin-requiring code from the UI, use WCF to ask the service to do it.
Beware that hostile parties may impersonate the UI and ask the service to do malicious things; you need to carefully figure out what the service should be able to do in response to IPC calls.

Your problem is not a UAC problem, it is a security problem.
And the answer depends on what your application that "requires admin rights" needs to do.
If your application needs to be able to start, and stop services, then the User needs the ability to start and stop services. In which case you need to give the users that privilege.
If the user's need the ability to alter or delete files, then they need that privilege too. In that case it is easier to grant Full Control permissions to Everyone.
If your application needs the ability to modify registry keys in the HKLM tree then you can, again, grant Full Control to Everyone in the registry.
If you need your users to have the ability to modify items, then they need permissions to modify those locations. Granting them those NTFS permissions is not a bad thing; it is exactly what those permissions exist for - to control access.
But why
But then we ask why? What is it you're doing that users need all the rights of an administrator, and all capabilities of an administrator, all the power of an administrator, but you don't want to make them a member of the Administrator's group?
The answer is almost invariably that your internal use application doesn't need to run as an administrator.
What Would XP Do?
The question becomes:
What would you do on Windows XP?
A standard user on Windows XP didn't even have the UAC convenience feature. If a user wanted to run an application an administrator: they had to logout and login as an administrator. How did, or how would, the application work on a system with UAC disabled?

Presumably very little of your application needs to run as admin - the rest would be better running as the unprivileged user. This is very common (think self-updating browsers, for example).
The proper way to do this is to install a service to do the privileged bit, and have the UI communicate with the service.

Our application requires admin access to the machine ...
Why?
You cannot bypass the UAC prompt, and this is by design.
See FAQ: Why can’t I bypass the UAC prompt? for a good discussion of why. Excerpt:
If it were possible to mark an application to run with silently-elevated privileges, what would become of all those apps out there with LUA bugs? Answer: they'd all be marked to silently elevate. How would future software for Windows be written? Answer: To silently elevate. Nobody would actually fix their apps, and end-user applications will continue to require and run with full administrative permissions unnecessarily.

How do I make a console app always run as an administrator?

I have a console application that was developed to be called by a erp software.
They call my app inside the erp and when they do it, i always get errors related to the insufficient permission to do it.
I have checked the "run this program as an administrator" checkbox in the properties of the exe for all users but the result is the same.
I have read something about adding a manifest that will make the app prompt for the uac dialog, but thats not what i want because the app will be called from erp on the server and clients will not see the dialog on server.
Can someone explain me how to make this console app always run as administrator?

Add into your project Application Manifest File (Add -> New Item -> General -> Application Manifest File) and add the below node into the app.manifest:
<requestedExecutionLevel level="requireAdministrator" uiAccess="false" />
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb756929.aspx

First, understand that there WILL BE a UAC dialog at some point in this process. There is no way to avoid it. There are a few approaches you can take:
Have the people run the ERP software elevated. I am including this only for completeness. It is awful to have to consent to the UAC prompt every time you run the app when you usually don't need the powers. It would be a handy quick test, though, for you to confirm that if your app is elevated, things will work. Everything launched from an elevated process is elevated, so if your app still gets the error message, this isn't something you'll fix by elevating.
Change the code in the ERP app to launch your app elevated. You mention C#. Launching with the runas verb is an approach here. This puts the burden on the ERP developer and they may not be able to do it.
Add a manifest to your app. You can embed one, or if your app is called foo.exe just hand-create a foo.exe.manifest file with the appropriate requestedExecutionLevel. To embed one, use the Properties page of your C# project to choose the right kind of manifest. Make sure you're launched with UseShellExecute set to true, or the manifest will be ignored.
If you choose the first option, the UAC prompt will be every time the ERP app launches. Not good. If you choose the second or third, the UAC prompt will be every time your console app is launched from the ERP app. Probably acceptable.
One other thing you might consider is looking far more seriously into why the console app needs admin privs. Are you writing to the root of C or to Program Files? Are you updating a registry key in HKLM? Whatever you're doing, why are you doing it that way? Unless your app installs or configures something (in which case getting a UAC prompt is good and proper) you should try to adapt it so that it writes to pre-user storage and doesn't need elevation. Then you will no longer be worrying about how to launch it elevated, in any case.

create a batch file containing something like:
runas /env /user:%USERDOMAIN%\%USERNAME% cmd.exe /K YourProgramName.exe
Where %USERDOMAIN% and %USERNAME% are replaced by your admin account details.
And run that instead?

Can I modify a Win7 environment to allow a .Net program to always run as Administrator?

We are about to roll out several hundred new machines running windows 7, with the OS installed via WDS so at the moment we can make changes and sysprep them into the build.
The problem is a .Net app we wrote years ago which itself spawns a modified command shell. That shell runs a dataflex application that itself needs to run with elevated permissions.
We don't grant users any general admin rights.
Is there a mechanism where we can pre-allow our .Net app to run as administrator so that the command control runs as Administrator?
I'm aware of the changes I can make in the app.manifest to require that the program runs as Administrator. I'm not aware of how I can (as an Administrator) configure the machine to allow that to happen without giving the user more rights or credentials than I would want them to have.

Does the application have to run as Administrator, or does it just need access to specific things? If it has a spurious "am I admin" check at startup, you can probably use a shim from the Application Compatibility Toolkit to lie to it, and then configure access permissions to the things that it actually needs.
If that looks like it'll fly, then you'd be better off taking further questions over to serverfault.

What Roger is getting at is that many people assume that if an app doesn't work as a normal user, they have to give it Administrator rights.That's not true in many, if not most cases. You have to find out WHAT specific rights it's failing with, and then assign those rights. This is more work, but it avoids giving general administrator rights to people.

Win C#: Run app as administrator without UAC prompt

I need one of my .exe to always run as administrator without UAC prompt. My program will be installed with setup, which will have for one time admin rights, and I need to perform such step in this setup that my exe will be always executed as admin without UAC prompt.
I've found 2 solutions so far:
1.
Use custom service, which will elevate the program for me.
2.
Use Task Scheduler.
Is there any other solution? Some manifest probably?
Thanks.

If it were possible to do this, then UAC would be completely ineffective. The inability of applications to elevate themselves without user consent is the fundamental principle behind UAC.
Aside from already having an elevated process that launches it (i.e. service or task scheduler), the answer is no, it can't be done.

Of course what you are supposed to do if you want to just drive UI is to use the UI access flag in your manifest (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms742884.aspx). If you install your application in a trusted location (e.g. system32) and it is signed (bleh!) then when you run your application it will be elevated to high (for an admin account).
The signing requirement makes it slightly annoying but at least it reduces slightly the attack surface as your code gets run with high integrity but not with an administrator token.

Install program that has to be run as administrator

Background: I am by no means a windows security / user permissions expert. I have an application (written in C#), that has to be able to write / delete files & folders in its root directory, write / delete files elsewhere on the disk, write/modify values in System Registry (Local Machine) and start & stop other applications and services. I figure that I need administrator privileges for at least some of those actions.
I tried running this and on computers with UAC turned off it works great without any additional settings. However on computers with UAC turned on (any level above 'never notify' in Windows 7) it will crash. I need it to work on all computers.
Up to now I would just manually check the "run this program as administrator" checkbox and everything would be fine. However now we have decided that we will allow customers to install this software on their own, and it needs to run "out of the box".
I have a deployment project in Visual Studio 2008 that installs everything and writes the necessary start up data in registry. What I need to do now is to set the "Run this program as Administrator" flag. I am guessing this isn't quite as simple as I'd like it to be.
So What is the proper way of doing this? This program is started on startup, and it would be irritating for our customers if UAC would pop up (and possibly dim the screen) every time they restart their computer.
Thank you for your help.
EDIT: Thank you for your replies. I realise that working around UAC would be frowned upon, and I can see that Microsoft does not support "white lists" so it would ask for permission only once. That's fine I can respect that, however I do have some follow up questions:
Can you provide me with a link that will show me how to properly elevate the program to correct elevated state? Is there any literature on what are the options, etc... Basicly I'd love a UAC 101 guide.
Is there a way to elevate the security status when I need the extra privileges (and only then prompt with UAC). Basicly this applications runs in the background, doing mostly nothing for most of the time. Every now and again it will check some files (at this point I will require to be able to write to disk and read the registry (read only is fine at this point), however since it's a temporary folder it wouldn't matter where I'd put it. If there is a location where the application can write without any privileges that would be perfect.)
However at some point I will need to preform all the rest of the tasks (user needs to confirm this action anyway) so if UAC would prompt at this point that would be no problem. Is there a way to elevate it just at this point, and then return it to default permissions?
Will such a solution work with older versions of Windows, including Vista and Xp (and perhaps older?) What would it take to make it work?

The proper way is to elevate when the program starts, with the UAC prompt (which you can set via the program's manifest) - attempting to be clever and bypass it is frowned upon.
Think about it - if you could install something which would elevate automatically without the UAC prompt ... what would be the point of UAC?
To add a UAC manifest to a program you simply add the manifest in a project and edit it. A sample manifest for UAC is here. If you want to elevate at the last possible moment then you need a spawn separate process - you cannot elevate an existing process. So separate that bit out and then start it using
Process.StartInfo.UseShellExecute = true;
Process.StartInfo.Verb = "runas";

You need to rethink how your application works. You're quite correct that it would be annoying to display an elevation prompt on login. So don't do it. On the other hand, you may well have tasks which you need to perform using administrative access.
So you have two choices:
Change your tasks so that they no longer require administrative elevation (e.g., write your files elsewhere).
Break your application into a Windows service component and a user interface component. The service component can run under an elevated account (hopefully the least-elevated account necessary to perform the tasks you need to do). The user interface component can talk to the service (via named pipes or similar) when necessary.

You can split your program into two components:
a user application running without elevation
a Windows service that is responsible for the tasks that require elevation
Since you're using .NET, communication between the components is probably easiest done using WCF.
And as a side note: Programmatically modifying files under C:\Program Files is not considered good practice and might lead to a number of other problems. Windows has dedicated places for storing configuration settings and other program data.