What does HRESULT 0x80040E70 (SEC_E_INVALIDOWNER) mean?

 
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SEC_E_INVALIDACCESSENTRYLIST SEC_E_INVALIDACCESSENTRY

SEC_E_INVALIDOWNER

Exact value and result class

SEC_E_INVALIDOWNER has unsigned value 2147749488 (0x80040E70) and signed 32-bit value -2147217808. AllStat describes it as “Trustee supplied as owner is invalid or unknown to the provider”. In this result, a trustee supplied as the new owner is invalid or unknown to the provider.

The high bit is set, so this result is a failure HRESULT. Its facility is 4 (FACILITY_ITF) and its low code is 3696 (0x0E70). These fields identify an interface-defined result family; they do not identify the provider instance, method, object generation or partial effects.

Contract boundary

OLE DB security administration represents trustees, owners, groups, protected objects and access-entry lists as separate entities. A syntactically valid trustee can still be unknown to a provider, and an allowed permission set depends on the protected object type.

Investigation of this result should start with the provider security interface, effective data-source namespace and exact trustee or access-entry structure supplied. Capture it before ADO, ATL,.NET or a database abstraction layer replaces the native HRESULT with a generic exception.

Evidence to collect

A useful this result event records provider CLSID and version, process architecture, interface IID and method, object correlation ID, transaction state and the immediately preceding HRESULT. When recording it data involving SIDs, account names, groups, ACL contents and protected object identifiers, use types, lengths, hashes or redacted identifiers rather than secrets or complete business data.

  • Evidence 1 for it: owner trustee form and normalized identity.
  • Evidence 2 for it: provider lookup and ownership capability.
  • Evidence 3 for it: current object owner and target object type.

Conditions that specifically lead to it

  • Cause 1 for it: the trustee is malformed.
  • Cause 2 for it: the trustee is well-formed but not recognized.
  • Cause 3 for it: the provider does not permit that trustee type to own the object.

Diagnostic sequence

  1. Capture raw 0x80040E70 and symbolic it at the native call boundary.
  2. Identify the exact failing stage for it: a trustee supplied as the new owner is invalid or unknown to the provider.
  3. Retrieve all OLE DB error records for it before another COM call replaces thread error information.
  4. Compare the live object state and provider-granted capabilities with the input that produced it.
  5. Reduce the operation to the smallest case that preserves the same security contract.
  6. Apply one evidence-backed correction for it and verify that the result is not merely replaced by a neighboring HRESULT.

Retry and recovery

Retry rule for it: retry after supplying a recognized owner-capable trustee. A it retry is safe only when the relevant input, object generation, capability or external state has changed. Before replaying a modifying call that returned it, determine whether rows, schema objects or URL resources were partially created or changed.

Do not turn it into an unbounded retry loop. Preserve cancellation for it and use a fresh provider object when the failed call may have left local state ambiguous.

Corrective actions

  • Action 1 for it: resolve and validate the owner before SetOwner.
  • Action 2 for it: select a trustee type eligible for ownership.
  • Action 3 for it: keep owner assignment separate from ordinary access grants.

Practical scenario

A deployment assigns ownership to a service alias the provider cannot resolve; using the mapped provider principal succeeds. Keeping it with the method and object state makes this scenario diagnosable instead of reducing it to “database error”.

Developer and operations guidance

Code handling it should release COM objects in ownership order, retain per-row, per-column or per-property statuses, and log granted capabilities rather than only requested options. While handling it, opaque values such as HACCESSOR, HROW, HCHAPTER, DBID components and provider handles must remain scoped to the object that issued them.

Operational dashboards for it should group by provider version, interface, method and normalized failure stage. A it event must not expose passwords, tokens, full connection strings, unrestricted command text or raw row contents.

Difference from nearby HRESULT values

SEC_E_BADTRUSTEEID concerns malformed trustee data generally, while it applies to the trustee in the ownership role. Telemetry and remediation for it should keep these outcomes distinct.

Official Microsoft references

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