Create a process with ordinary rights from an administrator process

Question

There is any way to run another process with ordinary rights from a process running as administrator? From a process with elevated rights I want to start a process with ordinary rights like it were started from explorer. I tried impersonation but I didn't work.

Answer 1

on linux you can use setuid to change the program user id

for windows you can look at his: http://serverfault.com/questions/16886/is-there-an-equivalent-of-su-for-windows

Answer 2

Use CreateProcessAsUser(). Details are in the linked SDK docs.

Answer 3

No this is not possible (There are several hacky ways to do this (Inject into explorer, task scheduler, SaferAPI+MediumIL etc) but none of them work in all scenarios)

Answer 4

This seems like a nice way to do it, provided you don't care about situations where the Shell is not running (e.g. possibly some Terminal Services application-only setups, perhaps, though I'm not sure):

http://brandonlive.com/2008/04/27/getting-the-shell-to-run-an-application-for-you-part-2-how/

It gets an interface to Explorer.exe, which should be running in the user's normal context, and asks Explorer to execute a command in its behalf. This is done just using simple, documented COM interfaces and without having to mess around with process tokens or code/DLL injection.