Running handShake in administrator mode to operate Grid 3

Sensory Software’s Grid 3 is a popular communication software package, running in Windows. Naturally, I would like handShake to be able to operate this software through the software keystrokes that handShake generates.  To get Grid 3 to respond to a software keystroke, I have to ’elevate’ the base.py script which runs on the communication device to run as an Administrator.

There is a second solution. I can use a Freetronics Leostick USB dongle as a pretend keyboard and have this generate keystrokes that appear as coming from a physical keyboard. I did this for a while, but this adds a layer of complexity and expense to the project. The simplest solution is to run handShake as an Administrator when using Grid 3, or other software that requires software keystrokes to come from an elevated source.

I tested out adding the functionality for handShake to detect when Grid3 was running, then automatically try to elevate the base.py script to run in Administrator mode. I got this running. Then removed the functionality. Why? Security. Software running as Administrator can damage your system if incorrectly or maliciously written.

Now handShake detects if Grid 3 is running and advises that this requires the software to be restarted as an Administrator, but does not try to automate this restart. The decision is left to the user.

The Grid 3 software is detected using the code shown below. The code looks through the titles of the windows for any that match the ones in the list called ADMIN_SOFTWARE. At the moment there is only one title to check for - ‘grid’. This is the title for a window running Grid3. As I find other packages that demand that my script runs as Administrator to have the ability to interact with it, then I will add their titles to the ADMIN_SOFTWARE list.

ADMIN_SOFTWARE = [‘grid’]

def target_admin_sware(software=ADMIN_SOFTWARE): ’’’ Check if target software requires this script to run as Administrator. ’’’ toplist, winlist = [], [] logging.info(‘Looking for software that requires elevation to Aministrator: {}’ .format(ADMIN_SOFTWARE)) def _enum_cb(hwnd, results): winlist.append((hwnd, win32gui.GetWindowText(hwnd))) win32gui.EnumWindows(_enum_cb, toplist) for sware in software: # winlist is a list of tuples (window_id, window title) for hwnd, title in winlist: if sware in title.lower(): logging.info(‘found software requiring Administrator mode {}’ .format(title)) return True return False

Running handShake as Administrator is a choice that the user makes and implements if he or she deems necessary.  As all of the code is on the project GitHub site, the code can be reviewed to check that it is safe to run as an Administrator.

One of the advantages of open source projects is that they are open to this kind of scrutiny to find security flaws.

For interest, I detail the code I added and then removed from the base.py script to enable it to detect if it is running as an administrator and if not, request to be restarted as an Administrator.

I added the option to run the script as an Administrator from the command line using the click library.

click.command()

@click.option(’-a’, ‘–admin’, default=False, help=‘Run as administrator. Required for Grid 3.’)

@click.option(’-k’, ‘–keystroke’, default=‘F1’, help=‘Keystroke to send. Default is F1.’)

def main(admin, keystroke): logging.info(‘software keystroke is {}’.format(keystroke)) logging.debug(‘admin flag is {}’.format(admin)) if is_admin(): logging.info(‘running as administrator’) else: logging.info(’not running as administrator’) if admin: logging.info(“restarting as administrator”) elevate() service_microbit(keystroke)

To test if the script is running as an administrator I added this method:

def is_admin(): ’’’ Is the script running as an Administrator? ’’’ try: return windll.shell32.IsUserAnAdmin() except: return False