We were exploring the feature Privilege Elevation – VMware Dynamic Environment Manager (DEM) within our development environment, and for some odd reason, a specific feature and configuration wouldn’t work in our setup.
Disclaimer
The windows registry mentioned within this blog post is used within enterprise-grade secure environments. The hardening measure is part of CIS Benchmarks on Windows 10. If your machines aren’t hardened, the feature typically works out of the box. For example, in my home lab, I had no issues with the Privilege Elevation feature working.
Issue
Whenever we enable the feature and apply any settings, it will not work. It didn’t matter which configuration you picked. The error within the logs remains constant.
The error within the FlexEngine-ElevatedTasks.log
2022-02-21 13:02:30.122 [ERROR] Cannot launch elevated task 'TaskName01' (token infrastructure not available)
2022-02-22 11:22:02.960 [ERROR] Cannot launch elevated task 'TaskName01' (token infrastructure not available)
2022-02-28 18:23:19.736 [ERROR] Cannot launch elevated task 'TaskName01' (token infrastructure not available)Cause
Provided by VMware – The additional configuration on LSA Protection causing issues with the VMware DEM agent (2103 Version). The windows registry key – HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa
RunAsPPL=1Resolution
My team managed to open a VMware GSS case handled by GuruKripal (A very helpful support engineer), we had to provide numerous amount of logs, procmons and group policy export of the enivornment. After giving them the export of our CIS Benchmarked group policies, they could reproduce the issue. In the end, the VMware engineering team provided us with a newer build of DEM Agent (10.2.4.1023 x64.msi).
If you encounter a similar issue, you can raise a VMware support case to obtain the fix or/else, I was assured all future releases of DEM Agent would include the fix. I hope you will find this information useful if you encounter the issue. A big thanks to my teammate Jishan T for his continuous effort while troubleshooting with GSS over 6+ months.
Thanks,
Aresh Sarkari
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