Partial Admin Privileges in App

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I have an app that can mostly run as the current non-admin user, but some features of the app (user-activated by way of a button click) need to have admin privileges to work. I want the UAC to pop up when the user tries to use these privileged features, but I don't want to have to run the app as admin. Is that possible without moving the privileged features into their own executable?

I've been googling for the last hour or so, and I can't find anything that doesn't require the entire app to be run as admin.

EDIT =============

As it stands right now, my solution was to create a separate console application to contain the privileged code. It's not the way I wanted to do it, and at best it's merely a work-around.

I guess I can understand the possibility of exploiting some esoteric attack vector if running parts of a program with elevated privileges was allowed, but this is damn inconvenient. I thought they called this stuff "managed" code.

Posted 1-Feb-11 2:47am

#realJSOP

Updated 1-Feb-11 3:37am

v2

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Indivara 1-Feb-11 8:58am

I've searched for this once and given up. Hope I'm wrong, but I think it is impossible.

fjdiewornncalwe 1-Feb-11 10:09am

An excellent question. I'll have to look into this a bit tonight, I think. It seems to me that in Windows 7 it should be possible since auto-updater applications seem to do what you are asking.
[Edit]Like you say, I wonder if the way to do it is to spawn a separate process when to activate these features and that this would be the workaround.[/Edit]

#realJSOP 1-Feb-11 10:26am

But it has to work on XP and Vista as well. I can't really rely on something that's just in Windows 7. However, if you find something, by all means let me know. I have the workaround described above in place, and it works well (despite the fact that I had to create a completely separate app to do it - grumble, grumble).

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Prerak Patel · Answer 1 · 2011-02-01T02:51:00

Solution 1

Will this help?
Add a UAC shield to a button when elevation is required for admin tasks[^]

COM Elevation (in case this may help)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms679687.aspx[^]
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/127042/how-to-uac-elevate-a-com-component-with-net[^]

Posted 1-Feb-11 2:51am

Prerak Patel

Updated 1-Feb-11 3:03am

v3

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Indivara 1-Feb-11 8:56am

That restarts the _entire_ app with admin privileges.

Prerak Patel 1-Feb-11 9:01am

Yes, but that's how it works.

4
down vote
accepted
"I don't believe that it is possible to elevate the currently running process. It is built into Windows Vista that administrator privileges are given to a process upon startup, as I understand." from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/573086/how-to-elevate-privileges-only-when-required

Still I got some links, it that can help. Updating the answer.

Indivara 1-Feb-11 19:07pm

Yeah, thanks for the link. I wasn't criticizing you (no down-votes from me), it just seems strange that nowhere in the documentation does it say so clearly. The ability to elevate one assembly, while the entire app is still running, would have been nice. Just wishful thinking...

#realJSOP 1-Feb-11 8:59am

Like Indivara said, it restarts the app as admin - I don't want to do that.

Partial Admin Privileges in App

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Partial Admin Privileges in App

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