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The whole industry has a permission problem. There's this concept called the "principle of least authority," the idea that programs should only have access to t
by ryukafalz 6y ago
The whole industry has a permission problem. There's this concept called the "principle of least authority," the idea that programs should only have access to the information they need to do their job, and no more. We are so far away from that it's not even funny.
Overbroad OAuth scopes are one example of this, yes. Here's another: consider all the dependencies you use in your applications as a developer. Any single one of those (perhaps hundreds of) dependencies can typically do anything you can do; it can rifle through your ~/.ssh directory looking for private keys, it can add stuff to your .bashrc, it can make arbitrary network connections, it can edit your browser settings. Likely most of them don't need to be able to do any of this. And yet that's what we accept in our computing environments, every single day.
Yes, it's incredibly dangerous.
- XorNot 6y agoThis is what SELinux gets quite right under some configurations: that my home directory has distinct types of files and programs need to ask for very specific permissions to access some of them. Though MAC schemes in the Linux world are incredibly fragmented these days and containers have just made that worse.
- mikewarot 6y agoSELinux is a stopgap... it would be better for the system to provide a PowerBox to select files, instead of hoping your programs access the right files. It gives you far more expressive power and safety, and protects you from confused deputies or malicious software. Some day we'll move to capability based systems, and I hope this means we can finally ditch the false idea that you can enumerate all the bad programs, and write ones that never go wrong, nor get confused.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]