Question

How can my vbscript detect whether or not it is running in a UAC elevated context?

I have no problem detecting the user, and seeing if the user is within the Administrators group. But this still doesn’t answer the question of whether the process has elevated privs or not, when running under Vista or Windows 2008. Please note, I need only to detect this status; not attempt to elevate or (err ..) de-elevate.

Answer 1

The method I finally settled on depends on the fact that Vista and Windows 2008 have the whoami.exe utility, and it detects the integrity level of the user who owns the process. A couple of screenshots help here:

WHOAMI, normal and elevated, on Vista http://lh3.ggpht.com/_Svunm47buj0/SQ6ql4iNjPI/AAAAAAAAAeA/iwbcSrAZqRg/whoami%20-%20adminuser%20-%20groups%20-%20cropped.png?imgmax=512

You can see that when cmd is running elevated, whoami /groups reports a ‘High’ mandatory integrity level and a different SID than when running non-elevated. In the pic, the top session is normal, the one underneath is running elevated after UAC prompt.

Knowing that, here is the code I used. It essentially checks the OS version, and if it is Vista or Server 2008, calls CheckforElevation which runs whoami.exe /groups, and looks for the string S-1-16-12288 in the output. In this example I just echo status; in the real script I branch to different actions based on the result.

sub GetOSVersion Dim strComputer, oWMIService, colOSInfo, oOSProperty, strCaption, strOSFamily strComputer = '.' Set oWMIService = GetObject('winmgmts:\\' & strComputer & '\root\cimv2') Set colOSInfo = oWMIService.ExecQuery('Select * from Win32_OperatingSystem') 'I hate looping through just to get one property. But dunno another way! For Each oOSProperty in colOSInfo    strCaption = oOSProperty.Caption  Next If InStr(1,strCaption, 'Vista', vbTextCompare) Then strOSFamily = 'Vista' If InStr(1,strCaption, '2008', vbTextCompare) Then strOSFamily = '2008' If InStr(1,strCaption, 'XP', vbTextCompare) Then strOSFamily = 'XP' If InStr(1,strCaption, '2003', vbTextCompare) Then strOSFamily = '2003' If InStr(1,strCaption, '2000', vbTextCompare) Then strOSFamily = '2000' If strOSFamily = '' Then      Wscript.Echo 'No known OS found. (Script can detect Windows 2000, 2003, XP, Vista, 2008.)'  Else      Wscript.Echo 'OS Family = ' & strOSFamily End If Select Case strOSFamily 'if Vista/2008 then call CheckforElevation Case 'Vista'     CheckforElevation Case '2008'     CheckforElevation Case Else     Exit Sub End Select end sub  sub CheckforElevation 'test whether user has elevated token  Dim oShell, oExecWhoami, oWhoamiOutput, strWhoamiOutput, boolHasElevatedToken Set oShell = CreateObject('WScript.Shell') Set oExecWhoami = oShell.Exec('whoami /groups') Set oWhoamiOutput = oExecWhoami.StdOut strWhoamiOutput = oWhoamiOutput.ReadAll If InStr(1, strWhoamiOutput, 'S-1-16-12288', vbTextCompare) Then boolHasElevatedToken = True If boolHasElevatedToken Then     Wscript.Echo 'Current script is running with elevated privs.' Else     Wscript.Echo 'Current script is NOT running with elevated privs.' End If end sub