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Comment by mappu | Hacker News Reader

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)?

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Putting 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.

Yea, 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

The 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.

Maybe 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 :)

> I'm still shocked to this day that we managed to ship this at all

Why?

Sorry, have you never read anything about Microsoft before? I'm not sure why people are being so critical of OP.

Look, 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.

To 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.

Pretty fair, especially since there's already tons of ways (albeit far less convenient) to accomplish nonmalicious escalation.

Great work making this happen!

Makes sense.

Thanks for taking the time to answer, very appreciated! You must be happy to have been wrong, ah ah.

You must feel like you just shipped Duke Nukem Forever.

Let's hope people actually use Sudo for windows though.

If you can get the suggestion passed on, a simple way to run a process while _dropping_ elevation would be appreciated. Basically the _opposite_ of sudo. There should be a way to _easily_ drop permissions back to the standard desktop user (or lower?), like Linux's setuidgid. There's runas, but apparently that's not sufficient[0]; instead all I'm aware of is scheduled tasks and proxying through explorer, or leaving an unelevated process open and using IPC or other methods to tell if to run something else (none of this is easy in a simple batch file).

The biggest visibility into this issue is software installers, which regularly offer to launch the freshly installed program for the user's convenience...with the same elevated permissions the installer itself uses.

[0]: according to this SO answer, runas still runs the process with high integrity: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20218076/batch-file-drop...

I wish my fellow posters could get out of their own way long enough to congratulate you! this is a great feature. I'm glad you got it into the build and I can tell you're excited about it. I can't remember the last time. I was excited about a feature that I shipped. maybe I'm just burned out but it's really refreshing to see it's shining through your replies. companies like Microsoft and Google need more engineers like you that actually care about shipping cool shit.

A tool like sudo should probably be sufficiently integrated with UAC to be able to customize that dialogue box...

You 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?

You 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.

And 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.

lol, parent: "Microsoft is too dysfunctional to make a good product, be glad anyway"

me: "Why should we be glad that Microsoft is not functional enough to make a decent product...?"

HN: flag!

Maybe until UAC is improved you can ship with a launcher process that is signed by publisher "Unknown"?

From 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.

Yes, but then you would just run sudo cmd.exe [the program you want to run] and it will still say Microsoft.

Also 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.

I think you're overthinking this. At the point that the scammer is getting the victim to change settings, overcoming UAC is not the problem.

Can't you already do that today with cmd.exe?

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