Introduction

The present article deals with running windows processes using elevated prevliiges.There are also many other techniques for doing the above task like;-
1) The first technique is creating a manifest file and then adding the following given code.

<requestedExecutionLevel
level="asInvoker|highestAvailable|requireAdministrator"
uiAccess="true|false"/>

which is explained in there:http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb756929.aspx

2) Another technique is impersonating a User in your program.
which is explained in there;http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q306158

The technique which now I am going to explain is a little bit different from the conventional methodology.A tool created by Mr J.Robbins had made it very easy to perform elevated task with CMD.The details of tools are given in the link below:http://www.wintellect.com/blogs/jrobbins/elevate-a-process-at-the-command-line-in-vista
You need to put the elevate.exe in the follwing location to make it work
x86:C:\Windows\System32
x64:C:\Windows\SysWOW64

Sample usage is demonstrated below
1) Without Elevate Program

Without elevate

2) With Elevate Program

with elevate

3) And finally the result

Background

I was working on a project in which I have to remotely mange windows firewall through an IOS device. I made a WCF webservice in which windows netshell commands are executed on my server.I donot know why impersonation and websevice manifest techniques did not work when I executed a task therefore I adopted this technique to achive the desired results .Some of the snapshots of IOS client are given below who uses the webservice .

Main menu Server Manage Firewall settings netstat output on iphone

Using the code

The code of the wcf webservice is in c#, for ease I made small function to be executed on the server.Some of the the function which are related for executeing elevated processes are given below.

//A function which execute commands on cmd and return string output of cmd 
//the code is from msdn resources with some minor modifications      
public string  console(string command )
        {
            string result = "";
            string output = string.Empty;
            string error = string.Empty;

            ProcessStartInfo processStartInfo = new ProcessStartInfo("cmd", "/c "+command);
            processStartInfo.RedirectStandardOutput = true;
            processStartInfo.RedirectStandardError = true;
            processStartInfo.WindowStyle = ProcessWindowStyle.Normal;
            processStartInfo.UseShellExecute = false;

            Process process = Process.Start(processStartInfo);
            using (StreamReader streamReader = process.StandardOutput)
            {
                output = streamReader.ReadToEnd();
            }

            using (StreamReader streamReader = process.StandardError)
            {
                error = streamReader.ReadToEnd();
            }
            result = output;

            if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(error))
            {
             
                result = error;
            }
            return result;
        }

//An example function of blocking an ip adress using commad line with elevated privileges
void blockweb(string ipadres)
{
string info = console("elevate netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name=\"" + System.DateTime.Today.Millisecond + "\" protocol=TCP localport=80 action=block dir=IN remoteip=" + ipadres);
}           

//An example function which execute netstat -an command and return a json object 
string netinfo()
 {
    string info = console("netstat -an");
    return info; 
 }
//A sample return output is given below

netstat output in chrome browser

Points of Interest

Server end management tool for firwall is also built which i will explin in my next article

History

First vesion.

Elevated Privileges through command line in windows