Windows® via C/C++, Fifth Edition

When Administrator Runs as a Standard User

Windows Vista raises the security bar for the end user thanks to a set of new technologies. For application developers, the technology with the most impact is certainly the User Account Control (UAC).

Microsoft observed that most users were logging on to Windows with an Administrator account, which gave them access to vital system resources with almost no restriction because high privileges are granted to this account. Once the user logged on to a pre-Vista Windows system with such a privileged account, a security token was created and used thereafter by the operating system each time a piece of code tried to access a securable resource. This token was associated to newly created processes, starting with ...