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This question is bugging me for a while. How do I sandbox any application and run it on PC where I have only limited privileges (not administrative) ?

Surely, the application will require the UAC and administrative privileges but the sandbox program would emulate these and "play" the environment for the application where it can save to harddisk and registries.

Sandboxie.com allows application to do that, but I am not aware it does not need administrative privileges to run the sandboxed thing as such.

Am I somehow wrong? If so, please post a comment under this and suggest closure.

4 Answers 4

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Spoon.net - create the app on another computer with spoon, and then it will run it on anything, if you can build it in spoon successfully. no admin rights needed.

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You could use VMWare to create and boot up an operating system that does give you administrative permissions. It would solve all of your requirements in that it would be sandboxed and completely separate from your host OS, and you would be able to run programs, save to virtual disk, etc, all without having to change permissions on the host OS.

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  • I am not too sure, but I am not aware of a way to run VMWare without administrative privileges - this is a main question here, I need the sandbox that runs wihtout admin. privileges.. Feb 13, 2011 at 17:24
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    You'll probably need an administrator to install VMWare for you, but afterwards, you should be able to run it without administrative priviledges. I'd suggest trying it and seeing what happens. VMWare Player is free to use.
    – jmort253
    Feb 13, 2011 at 17:31
  • I know how VMware works; it is not what I am looking for in this thread. If there was a way to launch (without install) vmware..that's another story Feb 13, 2011 at 17:34
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I think some sort of virtualization technology is your answer. You'd need some admin rights to install the software, but once that is done, you should be good to go with only limited rights on the host OS.

VMWare, Virtual PC, Softgrid, would work, and there's others I'm sure.

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  • still does not answer my question, I'm talking right about that I don't want to install neither the virtualization technology. Why can't it run standalone? Feb 14, 2011 at 9:20
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    Sandboxing IS virtualization. I know of no other form of sandboxing that "emulate these and "play" the environment for the application where it can save to harddisk and registries" as you have described.
    – Jeremy
    Feb 16, 2011 at 6:10
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spoon.net has become turbo.net, but it has also become very commercial and very costly (except for Education licenses). It does not yet support Cloud packaging of applications.

In any case, any software that will fully isolate an application from its host will require installation to be able to hook the operating system, so without admin permissions you are limited to software that is already installed.

If the target PC already has Docker installed, packaging your application inside a container is an excellent way to run it while being totally isolated from the host. Containers are enjoying a big hype today, so if not enabled on the target PC, perhaps it will be easy to convince the administrator of enabling it for security.

Some other Portable application creators which might replace spoon.net are:

  • VMware ThinApp
    The basic "VMware ThinApp Starter Edition" is offered for free with any purchase of VMware Workstation.

  • Cameyo
    Cameyo is an application virtualization product. It aims to virtualize Windows applications so that they can run on other machines or in HTML5 browsers.

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