We’re building a webapi for our administrators. One of the features is stopping and starting a windows service on the webserver the webapi is hosted on. We needed to allow our application pool user to manage the windows service. For this we use the sc.exe tool.

First we collected the security descriptor (SID) for the application pool user with the code below.

$account = new-object System.Security.Principal.NTAccount("apppooluser");
$account.Translate([System.Security.Principal.SecurityIdentifier]).Value;
# output S-1-5-21-1003698448-2199609630-2888039566-500

Now we used se.exe to get and set the ACE for the windows service. The output of the first statement is used in the second statement, with the SID from above added before the S:

sc.exe sdshow Spooler
# output "D:(A;;CCLCSWLOCRRC;;;AU)S:(AU;FA;CCDCLCSWRPWPDTLOCRSDRCWDWO;;;WD)"
# add the apppooluser to the list in the D: section
sc.exe sdset Spooler "D:(A;;CCLCSWLOCRRC;;;AU)(A;;RPWPCR;;;S-1-5-21-1003698448-2199609630-2888039566-500)S:(AU;FA;CCDCLCSWRPWPDTLOCRSDRCWDWO;;;WD)"
# [SC] SetServiceObjectSecurity SUCCESS

Breakdown of the setting:

Now we can start and stop the windows service from our webapi. We added authentication and authorisation to the webapi to control who can perform the actions. Check-in and release this features. Done.

References

Security Descriptior Definition Language
ACE strings
Sc sdset
SC.exe