Bypassing Windows Administrator Protection

A headline feature introduced in the latest release of Windows 11, 25H2 is Administrator Protection . The goal of this feature is to replace User Account Control (UAC) with a more robust and importantly, securable system to allow a local user to access administrator privileges only when necessary.

This blog post will give a brief overview of the new feature, how it works and how it’s different from UAC. I’ll then describe some of the security research I undertook while it was in the insider preview builds on Windows 11. Finally I’ll detail one of the nine separate vulnerabilities that I found to bypass the feature to silently gain full administrator privileges.

All the issues that I reported to Microsoft have been fixed, either prior to the feature being officially released (in optional update KB5067036 ) or as subsequent security bulletins.