Windows - elevated privileges

With the introduction of Windows Vista, Microsoft introduced User Access Control (UAC). UAC is meant to safeguard users from running programs that can modify the operating system itself. Before such a program is run, a privilege elevation is required even if the user has full administrator rights. A dialog box appears that the user must click on before the execution begins. In order to run OpenVPN, elevated privileges are needed, as OpenVPN wants to open a system device and start a VPN connection. Especially if routes need to be added to the system, elevated privileges are essential.

With OpenVPN 2.3+, privilege elevation is built into the OpenVPN GUI application. That is, even if the Run as Administrator flag is turned off, the OpenVPN GUI application will still request elevated privileges when it is launched. This recipe will demonstrate this behavior, which was not present in older versions of OpenVPN.

Getting ready

Set up the client and server certificates...