Every Systems Administrator comes across issues from time to time that require either converting a SID to a friendly name or converting a friendly name to a SID. This can be useful in many troubleshooting or forensic activities, and there are numerous ways to approach this task.

Fortunately, there are tools readily available within the Windows Server Support Tools suite as well as free tools that can help you accomplish this task; for the purposes of this demonstration we will cover two alternate methods.

Method 1: Using ldp.exe from the Windows Server Support Tools suite

Assuming you have the Windows Server 2000 or 2003 Support Tools installed, you can simply execute ldp.exe from your run console or from the command prompt.

Once you have ldp up, you will need to connect to the environment for which you wish to execute a SID query by clicking on the "Connection" menu, selecting "Connect" and entering the name of the domain for which the SID in question resides.

Assuming a successful connection, you can now select the "Utilities" menu, and then select "Sid lookup". Type in your SIDs in a comma separated format and click ok.

For this example, we have entered the SID for the Everyone group; S-1-1-0. As you can see, in the right hand field, we have been returned the results "Everyone [S-1-1-0]".

This method can prove helpful, however the requirement with this tool is that you must know the SID in question, and this tool has no ability to do reverse lookups of name to SID, only SID to name.

Method 2: Using SidConverter.exe

SidConverter.exe is a freely available tool (Author unknown) that has the ability to do forward and reverse SID lookups, among other functions.

To do forward SID lookups (SID to name), simply type the SID into the top box labeled "SDDL" and click the Convert button.

To do reverse SID lookups (name to SID), check the "Do Account Name Lookup" box, type the name of the account into the "Account Name" box, and click Convert.

The SidConveter.exe tool can be obtained by clicking this link: SidConveter.exe . You will need to rename the file from SidConverter.exe_renamed to SidConverter.exe .