Microsoft: Introducing Sudo for Windows!

Aatube@kbin.social to Technology@beehaw.org – 42 points – Introducing Sudo for Windows!
devblogs.microsoft.com

Shipped in Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26052. https://www.tiraniddo.dev/2024/02/sudo-on-windows-quick-rundown.html claims it has a big security problem that makes the program accept calls to elevate from anywhere once first run

Edit:

  1. The security problem has been internally fixed and will be available in the next release
  2. It's not just an alias for 'runas'. It seems to be able to configurably block user input for sudo'd commands, retain the existing environment, ditch it and open a new window, and remember that you've sudo'd in the last minute or so.
  3. It brings up UAC instead of having you input the password
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If I'm understanding this correctly, it's not even copying. It's apparently just a wrapper for the built-in runas command that's been there since Windows 2000.

@OmnipotentEntity @Pilgrim it's actually not just a wrapper for runas. There's a lot of other plumbing here to get the console handle you're actually using plumbed to the target application. That's the magic that lets you actually interact with the elevated process in the same terminal.

With runas, the target application is just stuck in a separate console window (gross)

So please forgive me if this is a rather naive question. I haven't seriously used Windows in nearly 15 years.

I seem to recall runas being a lot like su, in that you enter the target user's credentials, rather than your own as in sudo. This works because sudo is a setuid executable, and reads from configuration to find out what you're allowed to do as the switched user.

Is the behavior of windows sudo like unix su or unix sudo with regard to the credentials you enter? Can you limit the user to only certain commands?

Exactly. Windows already has this functionality with runas and this implantation doesn't improve on it at all.

It's more complicated than that. It seems to be able to configurably block user input for sudo'd commands, retain the existing environment, ditch it and open a new window, and remember that you've sudo'd in the last minute or so.

Classic Microsoft. Just change the look and be done with. No need it to actually improve the internals.