One of the common issues we run into during security assessments and incident response cases is the issue of users being assigned too many permissions on their local computer. For the sake of convenience and expediency, end users often demand that they be assigned local administrator rights. These users, often in an agitated and exaggerated manner, explain to their bosses that they simply cannot do their job unless they are given these rights on their work computer. This begs the question, do end users normally need these rights or is there a better more secure approach to take. Or using an analogy, should we stop locking the doors to our home or vehicles because one day we might forget our keys and be inconvenienced in the process?

First of all, let’s start with the basic business principle – end users should be assigned the rights and permissions that they need on their computer in order to do their job. They should not be assigned any more rights or permissions than this, and they should not be given any fewer rights than this. Of course it can be tough to strike a balance between the two, but it’s certainly the ideal we should be striving for.

But what’s the big deal? Why not just assign everyone local administrator rights on their workstation and call it a day? We even saw one company take it so far as to add the local “Everyone” group to the local administrators group on all their machines to limit the helpdesk requests that would come in. Is this really so bad? The answer is YES!

If end users are assigned local administrator rights and they don’t need those rights and permissions it opens the door for a number of abuses. Malicious actors wanting to cause harm to the users can arbitrarily run code on their systems with full permissions if they can convince the user to click on a malicious link or open malicious email content. End users could turn off the security controls we use to protect our systems like whitelisting software, password controls, anti-malware software, and similar tools. Unapproved software could be installed on an end user’s machine, breaking business critical applications, thus requiring troubleshooting from desktop support. And the list goes on…

Basically if you give end users local administrator rights to their workstations, in effect the organization has disabled all the locks on the system put in place to protect the end user and the organization’s data.

But the common complaint still exists. Will users be able to do their work if they are not local administrators? The answer of course is yes. But we still need to be able to assign the correct rights and permissions on the system to enable the user to work. One of the most common complaints we hear is that certain pieces of software simply will not function unless the end user is granted local administrator rights on their computer. How do we address that?

Whenever we encounter a software application on a Microsoft Windows system that believes it needs to have local administrator rights in order to function, there are a series of checks that we try first. In most every case when a developer states that they need local administrator rights, it is because they haven’t taken the time to try to figure out specifically what rights are necessary in order for the program to function properly or they are trying to access an operating system object that they should not be trying to access. So what are those checks, what do we do when we are troubleshooting to see why a program will not run unless you are an administrator?

Generally when an application developer says that their software requires local administrator rights, it is because their software is trying to access a protected operating system object. So to troubleshoot, the trick is to determine which object they are trying to access. When we’re troubleshooting this issue, it is always one of the following objects:

  • File system object permissions
  • Registry hive object permissions
  • User right assignments of the user
  • Mandatory Integrity Control (MIC) levels on an object

Nine times out of ten the issue is simply a file system issue. But don’t forget the other issues as well, they all can play a part.

If you don’t want to take the time to figure it all out on your own, there are of course software vendors that will make this process easier for you. Companies like Cyber-Ark, Computer Associates, BeyondTrust, and Cloakware all sell software designed to make this process easier for you. But as with anything else, trying the simple steps first often times will solve the issue for you.

In future posts we will look into each of the operating system objects above to see if we can better understand how to examine the necessary rights for each. But for now hopefully by examining those objects you will be able to determine what the specific, necessary rights are for your organization’s applications to function properly and only with the rights they need.