I understand *that*. My question is, what are you granting them "su" *for*? The entire kettle of fish? Or specific tasks. The privilege only allows you to impersonate a *client* (as in server-client), so (I would think) you can't do file browsing or http parsing (or can you?)On Wed, 2006-01-18 at 11:30 -0600, Paul Schmehl wrote:I can read. I need to know, from a practical application standpoint, what does this mean. What are the exposures?Sounds to me like that right allows a user to assume the security context of another user. Think of "RunAs" where a user runs a procedure as a different user. *That* ability should tell you a lot of what the exposures are. It's seems similar to allowing your *nix users to use su (without password check) to assume another user. (As root you can "su username" and you are that user. Imagine of your normal users could do that).
IOW, what are the *servers* that you can impersonate the client for? Is Windows Explorer a server, for example? Does it allow clients to access it? Is IE a server? Obviously, all the *services* (or at least the majority of them) would be servers - such as the Computer Browsing service - but does that service allow clients to access it? Or the Alerter service. Does it allow clients?
The explanations on MS's site are vague enough that they're meaningless. What services running on Windows allow clients to access them? And if they do, do they restrict access to the Local Machine? Or do they allow Remote Access? (For example, RPC is clearly remote. Is the Windows Time service?)
Knowing the answers to those would go a long way toward answering the question - what exactly are the capabilities that this privilege grants you?
Unfortunately, in the context of my problem, the users must have this right. Before I grant it, I want to understand exactly what the ramifications of that are. If it's too severe a risk, then I'll have to find some other way to solve this problem.I don't see why you would ever need to grant a normal user such a right. It may be of interest for service accounts, though.
Paul Schmehl (pauls@xxxxxxxxxxxx) Adjunct Information Security Officer University of Texas at Dallas AVIEN Founding Member http://www.utdallas.edu/ir/security/ _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.grok.org.uk/full-disclosure-charter.html Hosted and sponsored by Secunia - http://secunia.com/