5 ms·
Does the UAC prompt always say "Verified publisher: Microsoft"? Even without controlling stdin, malware at medium integrity could prompt to run a malicious comm
by mappu 3y ago
Does the UAC prompt always say "Verified publisher: Microsoft"? Even without controlling stdin, malware at medium integrity could prompt to run a malicious command, and users will only see Microsoft's good name in the popup.
Does this elevate within your own account token (i.e. will not work for non-Administrator users), or does it actually switch user (e.g. to LOCAL SYSTEM)?
- dist-epoch 3y agoPutting Microsoft in the UAC prompt is indeed weird. It should be the info of the target binary. This feature sounds a bit rushed, and it's early preview, maybe they fix it by the final release.
- zadjii 3y agoYea, that's a limitation of UAC at this point, and probably not one we can avoid. The "Show details" dropdown on the dialog does however show the commandline you requested, so at least that's one way of making sure it's the thing you ran
- SushiHippie 3y agoThe best way would be, if it could say something like: Allow $PARENT_PROCESS_NAME to run $COMMAND with administrator rights. So if you would enter the following in cmd.exe: sudo notepad.exe ... It would say: Allow Command Processor Shell to run notepad.exe ... with administrator rights.
- zadjii 3y agoMaybe for Windows 2025 we can work with the UAC folks to get something like that. I'm still shocked to this day that we managed to ship this at all. One step at a time :)
- jraph 3y ago> I'm still shocked to this day that we managed to ship this at all Why?
- Sakos 3y agoSorry, have you never read anything about Microsoft before? I'm not sure why people are being so critical of OP.
- jraph 3y agoLook, I'm genuinely curious and we happen to have a MS dev here who could provide interesting first hand insight. I'm not critical. I don't have enough knowledge on the situation to share criticism on the topic yet. I could have added "Could you expand on this?" to clarify my intent.
- zadjii 3y agoTo answer the original question: I've been at MSFT like, 8 years now? And this is probably the third serious attempt my team has made at Sudo for Windows. (I think I heard of a couple other attempts in my tenure as well). After the last attempt, my mantra had always been "this is impossible to actually ship". It's a tricky feature to ship, cause it is ultimately something that can be used as an escalation of privilege vector. Like, that's the entire idea. And there are a lot of people who (very rightly) get the ick when you say "we want to add this thing which can be used as an EoP to the OS image". So, it's kinda hard to believe that after four years of thinking it was impossible, we actually managed to get it out the door.
- londons_explore 3y agoA tool like sudo should probably be sufficiently integrated with UAC to be able to customize that dialogue box...
- Sakos 3y agoYou say that like Microsoft isn't an incredibly deeply dysfunctional company with absurd turf wars and conflicting interests between all the teams. You'd think it should be sufficiently integrated, but it's likely office politics made that impossible. How about be glad we got this at all as a first step, then maybe it will build momentum towards a better integrated solution?
- airtonix 3y ago[dead]
- KeepFlying 3y agoYou forgot that because of backcompat this solution will now become the unchangeable standard for years and anything more integrated will be in addition, not a replacement.
- Sakos 3y agoAnd that's OP's fault how? We often have to work with the environment and framework we have, not the one we wish we had where we could just immediately implement the best possible solution.
- Repulsion9513 3y ago[flagged]
- internet2000 3y agoJob security for us Microsoft MVPs
- Repulsion9513 3y ago
- marwis 3y agoMaybe until UAC is improved you can ship with a launcher process that is signed by publisher "Unknown"?
- worewood 3y agoFrom the diagram on the article I see that sudo is elevated first, then the target program is launched. Can't you call the target program directly? There must be a way, because explorer.exe is not elevated, and when you right click a program and choose "Run as administrator" you get a pop-up for the target .exe, not for Explorer.
- saagarjha 3y agoYes, but then you would just run sudo cmd.exe [the program you want to run] and it will still say Microsoft.
- gruez 3y agoCan't you already do that today with cmd.exe?
- whywhywhywhy 3y agoAlso the preference should actually describe it better > Enable Sudo > Enables the sudo command If I were a scammer I could make up an acronym or something that sudo means and trick someone into turning this on because the toggle doesn't actually describe what it is so I can just weave my own narrative.
- bragr 3y agoI think you're overthinking this. At the point that the scammer is getting the victim to change settings, overcoming UAC is not the problem.