If you're new to this concept, you probably read the title of this section and thought, oh, named pipe client impersonation? I wonder what wizard's hacking tool we'll be installing next! Nope. This is normal behavior and is implemented with the ImpersonateNamedPipeClient function. The security professional in you is thinking that allowing security context impersonation in IPC is just plain nutty, but the software designer in you may be familiar with the original innocent logic that allows for more efficient architecture. Suppose that a privileged process creates a named pipe. You thus have a situation where pipe client requests are being read and managed by a privileged pipe server. Impersonation allows the pipe server to reduce its privilege while processing pipe client requests. Naturally, allowing impersonation per se means that a pipe server with lower privilege could impersonate a privileged pipe client and do naughty things on the client's behalf. Well, this won't do. Thankfully, pipe clients can set flags in their CreateFile function call to limit the impersonation, but they don't have to. It's not unusual to see this skipped.