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App needing to run as admin but don't want to give permissions
Posted by Dan Mansfield on 07 January 2021 02:18 PM
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Have you tried using procmon to find out what specifically the app is requesting and getting denied access to do under a standard user account? I used it a while back on some construction-related software that "required admin rights" on a terminal server (uhh no). Turns out all it was doing was reading a value from a particular regkey that users couldn't access by default. Added user permissions to read it and the app worked marvelously from then on. If you've never used it, it can be pretty overwhelming as it logs every.thing.the.app.is.doing. It's pretty cool just to mess around with too. But once you learn how the filters work it can be very informative. Without using a third-party software solution, you can run something like ProcessMonitor while trying to launch the application as a non-administrator in order to watch registry and file access errors. Then you can make permission changes to only the files, folders, registry values, and registry keys that need to be accessed. I've never had this process not work against a legacy app that required local admin privileges. If you'd be interested in more info, PM me and I can look at the logs or walk through in more detail. The app isn't exactly super user-friendly, but once you get the hang of it, it's very helpful. Here's a nice little registry addition I found a few years ago for those stupid apps needing admin, but you don't want to give it and are leery of an app that stores them.
Merge that and when you right click the app icon (need a shortcut), you'll have a new entry in the context menu. I personally have used LUA buglight to ID what is making an app need admin rights. Same as someone below noted: needed one or two reg keys and write access to a single file in a dumb place. | |
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