how to hide .net app from process list

Question

We are developing a .net application to run on startup for all users. Now we want to hide this application from task manager -> process list so that logged in user cannot delete it. We are using windows-xp

Please let me know if this is feasible

Answer 1

It's definitely possible to hide a process; you're talking about designing a rootkit. If that's actually what you want to do, see this question.

It's usually not the right way to approach this problem however: if you're the admin of a machine and you don't wish other users to kill a process, you simply don't give them permissions to do it.

Have your users log on with a limited user account and have your application run under a different account.

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To get logon time reliably, you can use some either the windows security logs or if you're on a domain, active directory services:

Getting Local Windows User login session timestamp in C#

Getting idle time is more complicated because it depends on what you consider "idle" to be, but if you consider GetLastInputInfo() sufficient, this question describes a good way to do it, with a user process reporting back to a system process:

Getting user Idle time in C#?

Since the user cannot kill the system process, you could have that watch the user process and recreate it if necessary.