4 ms·
I've always wondered this. root on my laptop gives them .. all the things I can reinstall from a vendor image. My user, however, gives them my email, my photo
by soneil 11y ago
I've always wondered this. root on my laptop gives them .. all the things I can reinstall from a vendor image.
My user, however, gives them my email, my photos, my tax returns, etc.
Separation still sounds like a good theory, but I do wonder if we're putting a lot of effort into defending the wrong user.
- justinsaccount 11y agoExactly.. sandboxing helps with this, not unix style permissions. You still see a ton of comments saying things like "OS X and linux are secure because they use unprivileged accounts". But the security on unix is primarily to secure user alice from something that user bob does. It doesn't secure user alice from something that alice does. If alice gets infected with a cryptolocker trojan, it can't touch bobs files, but it can encrypt all of hers. On a single user system that only has an alice account, what is needed is to secure 'tax program' from something that 'web browser' does.
- PhantomGremlin 11y agoIt's simple to create multiple users on OS X. It's quick to switch between them. E.g. I have a separate user that I switch to just to contact a handful of credit card / bank sites. Same with tax returns. I don't do them as my normal user. They are not readable from my main account. But I don't do enough. E.g. email and photos are still accessible. Fortunately I lead an uninteresting life. The main threat to/from my photos is accidental deletion, filesystem corruption, drive crashes, etc. TMZ isn't going to pay anyone to steal them! The problems are not simple to solve. What I've done is simple half-measures. It's very hard to do more than that. Edit: and, of course, my normal user is "Standard", not "Admin". I switch to the admin user whenever I do sys admin. I never elevate privileges from my normal account.
- coldtea 11y ago>It's simple to create multiple users on OS X. It's quick to switch between them. It's also something 95% of OS X users don't do or care about.
- gammafactor 11y agoUnfortunately, and this goes for pretty much every UNIX out there with hardened (grsec) linux as possible exception, not just OSX, once someone has a local user on your machine, it's trivial to get root. On OSX, you don't even need a local privilege escalation exploit, so many other ways based on the way subsystems interact together. If you want robust security, you will need to forget about OSX/BSD/Linux and look at Qubes OS. It's the best we have right now and nothing else comes close. Alternatively, compartmentalize and segregate (at the hardware level, all virtual machines have tons of host escalation bugs) and accept the fact that you will get owned.
- rsy96 11y agoMaybe we should have easy to use sandbox commands controlled by the user. Currently all the software must be designed and compiled with sandbox restrictions deliberately (e.g. Chrome). It is better if we can sandbox arbitrary programs with convenience.
- okasaki 11y agoWhy does it need to be user controlled? Someone creates a sandbox profile for a program and then distributes it to others.
- exprP 11y agoDon't we have that? With SELinux, sandboxing is literally a command away (and the command is, aptly, named `sandbox´). There are certain inconveniences when it comes to sandboxing applications, especially applications that require an X server, which is why sandboxing is not done by default on any popular Linux OS.
- comex 11y agoCLI is one thing, but for GUI apps, OS X has supported sandboxing for years, enforcing it on all Mac App Store apps against developer outcry. On Linux, GNOME is working on something that looks quite a bit like how OS X did it: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/SandboxedApps https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/SandboxedApps So I think we're actually moving in the right direction, albeit extremely slowly and imperfectly.
- rsy96 11y agoThe problem with Mac App Store sandboxing is that it is not configurable and therefore many apps are simply unusable or extremely annoying sandboxed.