We’ve had 24 years of UAC and somehow Microsoft still can’t figure out either of the following:
The UAC prompt is triggered by an application either directly requesting elevation, or attempting to do something (write a file, tweak a registry value, change a group policy setting) that requires said permissions. So the OS obviously knows whatever it was the application tried to do, but it doesn’t tell you what that is. It just says it needs to make “changes to your device.” I would feel a lot better about that if they bothered to inform me maybe which file or directory it was trying to write to, or if it’s a registry change, or what. Because, you know, maybe I don’t want to let randomdownloadedapp32.exe change my system language to Swahili if I knew that’s what it was about to do.
There still isn’t a way to permanently mark a specific app or executable as trusted so it won’t nag you about UAC elevation. If you’re running an account with limited permissions and need to enter an administrator password every single time you launch some damn fool program, for instance, that’s a big time problem for your peons who may accidentally close that application at any time and then can’t reopen it. The workarounds for this (if any) typically revolve around divining whatever action that app performs that’s got Windows’ knickers in a twist, rather akin to guessing what a fussy baby is crying about, and then manually applying permissions to that file, directory, or object. Maybe it’s trying to write to %systemdrive%\Program Files? Maybe it’s keeping a count of something in the registry? Did it try to change a protected system setting like, ye gods forbid, the clock? Did it trip Windows’ built in installer detection? Or maybe it just blithely demands an elevated runtime for no reason because its developers were morons. I don’t fucking know, because the UAC prompt doesn’t tell you; See point #1 above.
What is interesting to me is that Steam somehow manages to run elevated commands when installing games and it, itself, never actually gives any UAC warnings and even kinda breaks if you force Steam to run as an admin from the compatibility tab.
We’ve had 24 years of UAC and somehow Microsoft still can’t figure out either of the following:
The UAC prompt is triggered by an application either directly requesting elevation, or attempting to do something (write a file, tweak a registry value, change a group policy setting) that requires said permissions. So the OS obviously knows whatever it was the application tried to do, but it doesn’t tell you what that is. It just says it needs to make “changes to your device.” I would feel a lot better about that if they bothered to inform me maybe which file or directory it was trying to write to, or if it’s a registry change, or what. Because, you know, maybe I don’t want to let randomdownloadedapp32.exe change my system language to Swahili if I knew that’s what it was about to do.
There still isn’t a way to permanently mark a specific app or executable as trusted so it won’t nag you about UAC elevation. If you’re running an account with limited permissions and need to enter an administrator password every single time you launch some damn fool program, for instance, that’s a big time problem for your peons who may accidentally close that application at any time and then can’t reopen it. The workarounds for this (if any) typically revolve around divining whatever action that app performs that’s got Windows’ knickers in a twist, rather akin to guessing what a fussy baby is crying about, and then manually applying permissions to that file, directory, or object. Maybe it’s trying to write to %systemdrive%\Program Files? Maybe it’s keeping a count of something in the registry? Did it try to change a protected system setting like, ye gods forbid, the clock? Did it trip Windows’ built in installer detection? Or maybe it just blithely demands an elevated runtime for no reason because its developers were morons. I don’t fucking know, because the UAC prompt doesn’t tell you; See point #1 above.
It’s always, always, this one.
Moron developer chiming in: it’s definitely this.
What is interesting to me is that Steam somehow manages to run elevated commands when installing games and it, itself, never actually gives any UAC warnings and even kinda breaks if you force Steam to run as an admin from the compatibility tab.
I’d hazard a gueas it’s not touching a system drive, but rather saving all files as a regular user.
Steam installs a system level background service to avoid UAC prompts. There was a privilege escalation vulnerability exploiting this service disclosed in 2019.
Unfortunately, I think the explanation for this one is that Steam bypasses a lot of Windows security and can be used as an exploration vector.