On Jul 22, 2015, at 1:49 PM, Graham Bloice <[email protected]> wrote:

> 
> 
> On 22 July 2015 at 18:37, Guy Harris <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> On Jul 22, 2015, at 9:37 AM, Graham Bloice <[email protected]> 
>> wrote:
>> 
>>> Most, if not all, will be running Wireshark unelevated, as this is a basic 
>>> tenet of Wireshark use. There are millions of lines of code in Wireshark 
>>> dissectors and they really shouldn't be given admin privs.
>> 
>> Does anybody know whether there exists, in Windows:
>> 
>>         1) an inter-process communications mechanism, either documented or 
>> reverse-engineered *and* likely to remain intact and usable from release to 
>> release and in future releases, over which a HANDLE can be passed;
> 
> DuplicateHandle -  
> https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms724251(v=vs.85).aspx

OK, so that's more than just UN*X dup()/dup2(), as it takes process handles and 
can affect another process's handles.

It says

        If the process that calls DuplicateHandle is not also the target 
process, the source process must use interprocess communication to pass the 
value of the duplicate handle to the target process.

which is the other part of this.

> A HANDLE to what though, the handle types that can be duplicated with that 
> call are limited?
> 
> If it's a socket HANDLE, then WSADuplicateSocket 
> (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms741565(v=vs.85).aspx)
>  is used.  This creates a structure that can be handed off to the target 
> process by some IPC mechanism.

Nope, it's a handle to something opened with CreateFile(), although the path is 
a \\.\xxx symbolic link (in the Windows NT sense) to a device, the device in 
question being the one provided by the WinPcap driver.  See 
PacketOpenAdapterNPF() in packetNtx\Dll\Packet32.c in the WinPcap source.

> The IPC Mechanisms supported by Windows are listed here: 
> https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa365574(v=vs.85).aspx,
>  pipes are commonly used.  I don't think there are issues with pipes between 
> a non-elevated process and an elevated one, but I haven't personally tried 
> that.

Sounds good (on UN*X, UNIX-domain sockets include functionality that's sort of 
the equivalent of DuplicateHandle() with the source process being the sending 
process and the target process being the receiving process).

>>         2) a mechanism by which a non-privileged process can request that a 
>> subprocess be run with elevated privileges - presumably requiring either 
>> user consent or something else to indicate trust - with such an IPC channel 
>> established between the non-privileged process and the privileged process?
> 
> A way to elevate a subprocess is via a call to ShellExecuteEx() setting the 
> lpVerb in the passed in SHELLEXECUTEINFO structure to "runas".  See 
> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vistacompatteam/archive/2006/09/25/771232.aspx.
> 
> This will invoke UAC if enabled (a it should be).

Just out of curiosity:

        What happens if something you run from a command prompt in Windows 
invokes UAC - does it pop up a dialog in the GUI?

        If you were to ssh into a Windows box (using third-party ssh or Windows 
10 ssh:

                
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/microsoft-bringing-ssh-to-windows-and-powershell/

        ) are you running in a session with any access to the GUI and, if not, 
what happens with UAC?

>> UN*Xes that support libpcap generally have 1) in the form of UNIX-domain 
>> sockets (or, in newer versions of OS X, Mach messages, over which those 
>> newer versions of OS X support passing file descriptors), and probably have 
>> 2) in the form of, if nothing else, sudo or some GUI equivalent.
>> 
>> The idea here is to have libpcap - and WinPcap, if the answers to those 
>> questions are both "yes" - invoke a *small* helper process to do what work 
>> needs elevated privileges to open capture devices, turn on monitor mode, 
>> change channels, etc., so that programs using those libraries do not 
>> *themselves* require elevated privileges.
>> 
>> If the answer for the first question is "no", then do we have some way to 
>> run dumpcap with elevated privileges and have a pipe between it and 
>> Wireshark/TShark?
> 
> That's what currently happens on Windows using a named pipe, without the 
> elevation though.

That's what currently happens on all platforms, using anonymous pipes on UN*X 
(are you certain the pipes are named on Windows?  They're created with 
CreatePipe() - see the code in capchild/capture_sync.c).  On at least some 
UN*Xes, dumpcap's privileges are elevated, but not by virtue of a "run with 
elevated privileges" call; the executable image is marked as getting elevated 
privileges (set-UID root, set-GID to the appropriate group, or appropriate 
individual capabilities).

I'm trying to see whether I can, ultimately, get rid of the need to run 
dumpcap, as well as the need for as much code as there is in dumpcap ever 
running with elevated privileges.
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