Friday 29 November 2013

How To Find a User's Security Identifier (SID) in Windows

 Hi to All,

It'll take less than a minute to find a user's SID in Windows.

Here's How:

  1. Open Command Prompt.
  2. Once Command Prompt is open, type the following command exactly as shown here, including spaces or lack thereof:
    wmic useraccount get name,sid
    and then press Enter. 
  3. You should see a table, similar to the following, displayed in the Command Prompt window:
    Name            SID
    Administrator   S-1-5-21-1180699209-877415012-3182924384-581
    Guest           S-1-5-21-1180699209-877415012-3182924384-604
    Bob             S-1-5-21-1180699209-877415012-3182924384-1342
    Test            S-1-5-21-1180699209-877415012-3182924384-1974
    Piyush          S-1-5-21-1180699209-877415012-3182924384-10347
    This is a list of each user account in Windows, listed by user name, followed by the account's corresponding SID.
    1. How To Find User's SIDs in the Registry:
      You can also determine a user's SID by looking through the ProfileImagePath values in each S-1-5-21 prefixed SID listed under theHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList key.
      The ProfileImagePath value within each SID-named registry key lists the profile directory, which includes the user name.
      For example, the ProfileImagePath value under the S-1-5-21-1180699209-877415012-3182924384-1004 key on my computer is C:\Users\test so I know that the SID for the user "Tim" is "S-1-5-21-1180699209-877415012-3182924384-1974".
      Note: This method of matching users to SIDs will only show those users who are logged in or have logged in and switched users. To continue to use the registry method for determining other user's SIDs, you'll need to log in as each user on the system and repeat these steps. This is a big drawback so, assuming you're able, you're much better off using the wmic command method above.