Privilege Injection for Desktop Administration Scripts
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Solution Overview
Problem
Users often lack sufficient privileges to perform desktop-administration tasks, such as drive mappings and printer assignments, which can be logistically challenging in distributed environments where shared administrative credentials are not available, and require developers to have knowledge of privilege-elevation mechanisms.
Innovation Solution
A method that monitors a user's desktop environment for administration events and automatically injects elevated privileges into privilege-agnostic scripts, allowing them to execute with administrative rights, simplifying desktop administration by decoupling script writing from privilege management.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of operation
If users execute desktop-administration scripts without elevated privileges, then script execution is simple and secure, but the scripts cannot perform administrative tasks such as drive mappings and printer assignments
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a privilege injection mechanism as an intermediary between the user script-execution process and the administrative task execution. The system monitors desktop-administration events, identifies scripts that need elevated privileges, and injects a security token with appropriate privileges into the script-execution process. This allows scripts to execute with both user context and elevated administrative rights, resolving the contradiction between simple execution and administrative capability.
2Adaptability or versatility
If separate administrative accounts are used to execute scripts with elevated privileges, then scripts can perform administrative tasks, but the system complexity increases and requires shared credential management in distributed environments
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts the privilege elevation mechanism from the script-execution process itself and implements it as a separate monitoring and injection system. The system monitors for desktop-administration events, identifies scripts needing elevated privileges, and independently manages the privilege injection through security tokens. This separation eliminates the need for separate administrative accounts and shared credentials, reducing system complexity while maintaining administrative capability.
3Adaptability or versatility
If developers write scripts with knowledge of privilege-elevation mechanisms, then scripts can execute with elevated privileges, but the learning curve and development complexity increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements self-service by having the system automatically monitor for desktop-administration events and inject privileges into scripts as needed. Scripts are written as privilege-agnostic code that simply executes administrative tasks without needing to know about or implement privilege elevation mechanisms. The system handles privilege management automatically, eliminating the learning curve for developers while maintaining full script execution capability.
Data Source
AI summary
In one embodiment, a method is executed by an information handling system comprising computer hardware. The method includes monitoring a desktop environment of a user for a desktop-administration event. The method further includes, responsive to a detected occurrence of the desktop-administration event, identifying at least one script-execution process to invoke. The at least one script-execution process executes at least one privilege-agnostic desktop-administration script. The method also includes determining whether the at least one script-execution process is designated for privilege elevation. Moreover, the method includes, responsive to a determination that the at least one script-execution process is designated for privilege elevation, injecting a security token of the at least one script-execution process with elevated privileges to yield a privilege-injected script-execution process. Also, the method includes invoking the privilege-injected script-execution process in the desktop environment so that the desktop-administration script executes as the user with the elevated privileges.