Aaron Margosis' "Non-Admin" and App-Compat WebLog

I wish I had the time to write up proper documentation for LUA Buglight , the utility I wrote that identifies admin-rights issues in desktop applications. LUA Buglight is one of many "spare time" projects I work on, and for the past year and a half or...

Kind of late to be posting this, but better late than never. I'm presenting three sessions at Tech*Ed in New Orleans this week: WCL204: What EVERYONE Should Know About Application Compatibility (co-presenting with Chris Jackson ) WCL301: Case...

Microsoft Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich’s recent post “ The Machine SID Duplication Myth ” confused many readers who didn’t understand the distinction between the two independent SIDs that belong to a domain-joined computer...

LUA Buglight 2.1, identifies admin-permissions issues ("LUA bugs") in desktop applications. New version supports Windows 7 (x86 and x64), Vista (x86 and x64), XP (x86 only) and corresponding Server OSes....

Because of my work with the Federal Desktop Core Configuration, I’ve published a set of three utilities that manage Local Group Policy.  The newest of these (ImportRegPol) parses registry.pol files and can convert their content to text.  I’ve...

Aaron Margosis appearing on a virtual round table this week about Windows 7 application compatibility, hosted by Mark Russinovich....

Sample code to demonstrate one way to start a program as the [non-elevated] desktop user from an elevated app....

A simple VB6 app to demonstrate "LUA bugs" - useful for testing tools and remediation techniques. Source code provided....

Second Preview Version of LUA Buglight 2.0 -- a utility to identify admin-permissions-required issues in desktop applications...

I'm on the schedule to speak at Tech*Ed EMEA in Barcelona the week of November 3-7. I've got three sessions listed below (sharing CLI08-IS with Chris Jackson ): Code Title Date/Time CLI403 Tools for Identifying...

PrivBar and MakeMeAdmin suddenly disappeared a few weeks ago. They're back, and PrivBar is now available for x64 too....

LUA Buglight 2.0 - preview version available for download...

In case I actually have any fans that are interested in things I've written outside of this blog (must be sick people)... I recently contributed a sidebar to the cover story of this month's TechNet Magazine: Hiding in Plain Sight - Security By Obscurity...

Pointer to a webcast with information about the upcoming LUA Buglight 2.0....

Sessions I'll be presenting at Tech*Ed North America 2008 (IT Professionals week)....

One reason why apps have security bugs -- because we developers were trained to focus on and typically only ever focused on how legitimate users will use the product -- we never used to have to think about misuse! A couple of years ago I wrote up...

The hidden trick to stopping explorer.exe on Windows Vista cleanly, without terminating it abruptly....

Since RunAs.exe won't run a program elevated, is there a way to trigger an elevation prompt from a script?...

Why Vista is better off without setuid or sudo....

What becomes of all my earlier non-admin tips, tricks and recommendations vis-à-vis RunAs, MakeMeAdmin, PrivBar and their interactions with IE and Explorer? The short answer is that Vista changes just about everything with respect to running with least privilege....

Improvements on my earlier post about setting color and title for CMD (and PowerShell) windows, based on admin/elevation status...

Need your help to fix an issue in LUA Buglight....

How to automatically set the color and title of *all* CMD shells based on admin/elevation status with a one-time, one-line configuration change to your system....

Updated information about LUA Buglight....

The SysInternals tools -- including Process Explorer, Regmon, Filemon, and many more -- are now available here on microsoft.com. A couple of major highlights include Process Monitor , a new tool that supersedes Regmon and Filemon, and the SysInternals...