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SEC_E_INVALIDOWNER
Meaning
Windows documents SEC_E_INVALIDOWNER as “Trustee supplied as owner is invalid or unknown to the provider”. In this case, a trustee supplied as the new owner is invalid or unknown to the provider.
Relevant contract
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.
Evidence to collect
When recording diagnostic 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: owner trustee form and normalized identity.
- Evidence 2: provider lookup and ownership capability.
- Evidence 3: current object owner and target object type.
Conditions that specifically lead to it
- Cause 1: the trustee is malformed.
- Cause 2: the trustee is well-formed but not recognized.
- Cause 3: the provider does not permit that trustee type to own the object.
Diagnostic sequence
- Identify the exact failing stage: a trustee supplied as the new owner is invalid or unknown to the provider.
Retry and recovery
Retry rule: retry after supplying a recognized owner-capable trustee.
Corrective actions
- Action 1: resolve and validate the owner before SetOwner.
- Action 2: select a trustee type eligible for ownership.
- Action 3: 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.
Difference from nearby HRESULT values
SEC_E_BADTRUSTEEID concerns malformed trustee data generally, while SEC_E_INVALIDOWNER applies to the trustee in the ownership role.
Official Microsoft references
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