How to run exe with/without elevated privileges from PowerShell

Let's split this into three parts.

First determine if current session is running with admin privileges:

$CurrentID = [System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent()$CurrentPrincipal = new-object System.Security.Principal.WindowsPrincipal($CurrentID)$adminRole = [System.Security.Principal.WindowsBuiltInRole]::Administrator# Check to see if session is currently with admin privilegesif ($CurrentPrincipal.IsInRole($adminRole)) {    write-host "Yes we are running elevated."}else{    write-host "No this is a normal user session."}

Now, if we are running with or without elevation, you can start a new process with elevated privileges like this:

$newProc = new-object System.Diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo "PowerShell"# Specify what to run$newProc.Arguments = "powershell.exe"# If you set this, process will be elevated$newProc.Verb = "runas"[System.Diagnostics.Process]::Start($newProc)

And lastly, if we have elevated privileges, but would like to start a new process without...

I have no idea. Will have to try to find the answer to this, but as it is not a common scenario, I had no luck so far.

EDIT: I have now seen a couple of “solutions” for this scenario. There is no native way to do this in .NET/PowerShell. Some are quite complicated (Calls to some 12 COM objects). This vista-7-uac-how-to-lower-process-privileges is a good reference.

The one that seems most elegant to me, is exploiting a “bug” in explorer.exe. Just launch you .exe using explorer.exe and the resulting process runs without privilege elevation again.

$newProc = new-object System.Diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo "PowerShell"# Specify what to run, you need the full path after explorer.exe$newProc.Arguments = "explorer.exe C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe"[System.Diagnostics.Process]::Start($newProc)

EDIT #2: Another way I have just found to start a new non-elevated process from an already elevated environment is to use the runas.exe with the 0x20000 (Basic User) trust level:

C:\> runas /showtrustlevels The following trust levels are available on your system: 0x20000 (Basic User) C:\> runas /trustlevel:0x20000 devenv

I use this as first command in all scripts that requires elevated mode, it transfer the script to another elevated process if I forgot to start up as Admin. You have to confirm so it's not suitable for automated tasks

If (-NOT ([Security.Principal.WindowsPrincipal][Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent()).IsInRole([Security.Principal.WindowsBuiltInRole] "Administrator")) {       $arguments = "& '" + $myinvocation.mycommand.definition + "'"    Start-Process powershell -Verb runAs -ArgumentList $arguments    Break }