Start As

What happens when a user without administrator rights needs to execute an action that requires elevated access? Generally, you'd have two possible choices.

One is to use CMD commands to bypass this issue, while the other would be to ask for the credentials from the administrator of that particular machine. Both ways have their issues, which is why StartAs could be a third, more suitable option.

The idea with this particular program is that it makes it easier for nonprivileged accounts to access elevated rights without doing any harm to the main account. Using CMD is dangerous because once you introduce the administrator user and password, these files are saved by the OS without being encrypted.

Thus, any other user with some computer knowledge could access this sensitive information. With StartAs, the credentials are stored in a file that is encrypted. You get access without the risk of compromising the main account.

The scenario in all cases exposed earlier begins with the user actually knowing the administrator credentials. The idea is to shortly transfer some of the privileges from one account to the other, instead of actually logging off and then in.

This makes much more sense in a work environment than anywhere else. Before actually using StartAs, one needs to create the encrypted file containing the admin credentials.

This means you'll need to add the app you need privileges for, the way you'd like to run the app, the credentials for running the program with higher privilege, and some extra features you can activate such as expiration date for the file, integrity checks and PIN confirmation for an even bigger sense of security.

StartAs is a great alternative in situations where you need higher rights to access files, but don't want or need to access the admin account per se to actually work with those files. It eliminates the risk of privacy breaches while making it simpler for other users on the same machine to access specific rights for use with specific apps and programs.