How to create a Windows Service that launches process as logged in User

help
#1

Hi Everyone,

I am new to Rust and I am planning to write a system service that runs with local system security context. But I want that service to launch an application with user's security context. In a nutshell, this service will be running in LocalSystem account and I am willing to launch the application as currently interactively logged on user.
In C++ we have these apis WTSQueryUserToken (to get the user token) and CreateProcessAsUser (to launch process as currently logged in user). I wanted to understand how complicated it is to implement that in Rust. How to use these apis in Rust ? I have checked crates.io but couldn't find any similar api.

Any sample service or leads will be of great help.

-Thanks.

#2

You can check out the winapi crate which contains raw bindings to these types of functions. Not sure if there is a nicer Rust wrapper for this particular API.

https://docs.rs/winapi/0.3/winapi/um/wtsapi32/fn.WTSQueryUserToken.html

https://docs.rs/winapi/0.3/winapi/um/processthreadsapi/fn.CreateProcessAsUserW.html

#3

Thank you so much @rossmacarthur for these pointers. I will try them.

#4

To continue with @rossmacarthur's point, the winapi crate contains bindings to all functions in the Windows API. So anything you would do with C++ can be done using that crate.

It won't be as nice as a safe wrapper/abstraction over the relevant APIs (the crate is essentially a big header file), but at least you'll be able to get the job done.

#5

Sure, thank you @Michael-F-Bryan.