4 ms·

Microsoft has been investing a lot of effort into security. If they had it their way, you wouldn't even be able to install unverified software. I'm not sure Mi

by nxc18 9y ago

Microsoft has been investing a lot of effort into security. If they had it their way, you wouldn't even be able to install unverified software. I'm not sure Microsoft has been making the bad "security is expensive" decisions since XP sp2. Note also that they've been ahead of the curve on security since Vista, which was much maligned (partially) as a result. Nowadays both macOS and windows effectively have UAC, but Vista took the heat for it. Same thing with blocking unknown software; Windows took the heat, but just you try to run non-Apple-signed packages on OS x.

yoz-y 9y ago
Does UAC and signing belong to the same bucket though? UAC has always been on macOS 10 because of the bsd root/user separation. For me the main problem is that on windows (Vista at least) the UAC seemed to fire on benign operations while letting you do quite dangerous ones without flinching.
- nxc18 9y ago
  Its true that there are holes and that UAC isn't a particularly strong security barrier (i.e. If an attacker is at the keyboard it won't do shit). But that's the same for OS x and they have some even worse patterns; e.g. I'm pretty sure half the installers I end up using take your password themselves and pass it on to some waiting sudo under the hood. They at the very least don't use the proper system way of doing things; i can tell because some things trigger touch id and some don't. Similarly, there have been many stories about dropbox circumventing system security. I have no doubt that if dropbox can figure it out, malware writers can, too.
- riskable 9y ago
  Based on the plethora of methods Microsoft has (intentionally) provided to bypass UAC I'd argue that it's the very definition of "security theater". UAC is nothing but a minor annoyance to attackers at this point. An extra step or two they have to add to their payload. Nothing more. It's also trivial to escalate from a regular user to NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM (which is a higher privilege than Administrator!). There's so many privilege escalation vulnerabilities in Windows it's hard to keep track of them all! A big reason for that is that Microsoft considers privilege escalation vulnerabilities, "medium risk".

by nxc18 9y ago

yoz-y 9y ago

Does UAC and signing belong to the same bucket though? UAC has always been on macOS 10 because of the bsd root/user separation. For me the main problem is that on windows (Vista at least) the UAC seemed to fire on benign operations while letting you do quite dangerous ones without flinching.

nxc18 9y ago
Its true that there are holes and that UAC isn't a particularly strong security barrier (i.e. If an attacker is at the keyboard it won't do shit). But that's the same for OS x and they have some even worse patterns; e.g. I'm pretty sure half the installers I end up using take your password themselves and pass it on to some waiting sudo under the hood. They at the very least don't use the proper system way of doing things; i can tell because some things trigger touch id and some don't. Similarly, there have been many stories about dropbox circumventing system security. I have no doubt that if dropbox can figure it out, malware writers can, too.
riskable 9y ago
Based on the plethora of methods Microsoft has (intentionally) provided to bypass UAC I'd argue that it's the very definition of "security theater". UAC is nothing but a minor annoyance to attackers at this point. An extra step or two they have to add to their payload. Nothing more. It's also trivial to escalate from a regular user to NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM (which is a higher privilege than Administrator!). There's so many privilege escalation vulnerabilities in Windows it's hard to keep track of them all! A big reason for that is that Microsoft considers privilege escalation vulnerabilities, "medium risk".