This had an obvious security component, but also an administrative component, in that it prevented users from accidentally changing system settings.Įarly Microsoft home operating-systems (such as MS-DOS, Windows 95- 98 and Windows Me) did not have a concept of different user-accounts on the same machine. Operating systems on mainframes and on servers have differentiated between superusers and userland for decades. One prominent use of this is Internet Explorer 7's 'Protected Mode'. To reduce the possibility of lower-privilege applications communicating with higher-privilege ones, another new technology, User Interface Privilege Isolation, is used in conjunction with User Account Control to isolate these processes from each other.

UAC uses Mandatory Integrity Control to isolate running processes with different privileges. In other words, a user account may have administrator privileges assigned to it, but applications that the user runs do not inherit those privileges unless they are approved beforehand or the user explicitly authorises it. In this way, only applications trusted by the user may receive administrative privileges and malware are kept from compromising the operating system. It aims to improve the security of Microsoft Windows by limiting application software to standard user privileges until an administrator authorises an increase or elevation. User Account Control ( UAC) is a mandatory access control enforcement feature introduced with Microsoft's Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 operating systems, with a more relaxed version also present in Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows 10, and Windows 11. From top to bottom: blocked app, app with unknown publisher, app with a known/trusted publisher. User Account Control 'Windows Security' alerts in Windows 11 in light mode.

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