Question

I am using CreateProcess, but I can’t start a process I am using the following code but I am getting the error “Invalid access to memory location” but I don’t know why.
Is there any problem with my code?

#include <Windows.h>
#include <stdio.h>

//#include "common.h"

int main(void)
{

    DWORD creation_flags = DEBUG_PROCESS;
    STARTUPINFO startupinfo;
    PROCESS_INFORMATION process_information;
    char *path_to_exe = "D:\\dbg\\calc.exe";


    startupinfo.dwFlags     =   0x1;
    startupinfo.wShowWindow =   0x0;


    startupinfo.cb  =   sizeof(startupinfo);

    if(CreateProcess(   path_to_exe,
                        NULL,
                        NULL,
                        NULL,
                        NULL,
                        creation_flags,
                        NULL,
                        NULL,
                        &startupinfo,
                        &process_information)){
        printf("We have successfully launched the process!\n");
        printf("[*] PID: %d\n", process_information.dwProcessId);
    }
    else
        printf("[*] Error: %d.\n", GetLastError());
}

Answer 1

You have only filled in 3 fields of the startupinfo Structure.
The remaining fields are filled with garbage, and some of that garbage is likely leading to bad problems.

You should fully initialize the structure, explicitly putting NULL, 0 and other “empty” values where you don’t want to specify anything.