3 ms·

People were mostly talking about drive-by infections and the fact that an unpatched Windows machine idling on the Internet could be infected in an hour or so.

by pyre 14y ago

People were mostly talking about drive-by infections and the fact that an unpatched Windows machine idling on the Internet could be infected in an hour or so. There's nothing anyone can do if a user installs software. UNIX design or not, if the user runs a program, it can access everything that the user can. Nothing that this malware did needed special access (e.g. root exploit).

mikeash 14y ago
That's a highly UNIX-centric attitude. There is no reason in general that an app should be able to access everything the user can access. For example, Mac and iOS apps cannot access the user's contacts without the user's explicit permission, even though the user can access the Contacts app themselves just fine. The idea that all apps run under a single "user" and all share the permissions of that "user" is just how UNIX does it, not how things must work. I don't think we've figured out proper app sandboxing yet (Mac, iOS, and Android all have their problems with it, and differently) but it seems to be the way to go.
- pyre 14y ago
  The security is still in the hands of the user. An app can ask for a handful of permissions that the user can just agree to. The user is still compromised, but now you can pin even more blame on the user. That doesn't help any.
  - FireBeyond 13y ago
    And for the last several years plus, the very vast majority of Windows malware has been similar in nature. But that's never really stopped the Apple faithful from being in willful denial about the same. - a recent convert to Apple
    - pyre 13y ago
      A good question to ask would be, "How many local privilege escalation bugs have popped up in Windows vs. Linux vs. OSX?"
claudius 14y ago
If you put in a lot of effort, you could try mounting /home and other user-writeable areas as noexec, use SELinux/AppArmor to do funny things to confine administrator-installed programs etc. etc. However, this will break nearly everything – and I am rather positive that Windows offers similar security measures, if required.
- glhaynes 13y ago
  This is basically sandboxing by hand.

by pyre 14y ago

mikeash 14y ago

That's a highly UNIX-centric attitude. There is no reason in general that an app should be able to access everything the user can access. For example, Mac and iOS apps cannot access the user's contacts without the user's explicit permission, even though the user can access the Contacts app themselves just fine. The idea that all apps run under a single "user" and all share the permissions of that "user" is just how UNIX does it, not how things must work. I don't think we've figured out proper app sandboxing yet (Mac, iOS, and Android all have their problems with it, and differently) but it seems to be the way to go.

pyre 14y ago
The security is still in the hands of the user. An app can ask for a handful of permissions that the user can just agree to. The user is still compromised, but now you can pin even more blame on the user. That doesn't help any.
- FireBeyond 13y ago
  And for the last several years plus, the very vast majority of Windows malware has been similar in nature. But that's never really stopped the Apple faithful from being in willful denial about the same. - a recent convert to Apple
  - pyre 13y ago
    A good question to ask would be, "How many local privilege escalation bugs have popped up in Windows vs. Linux vs. OSX?"

claudius 14y ago

If you put in a lot of effort, you could try mounting /home and other user-writeable areas as noexec, use SELinux/AppArmor to do funny things to confine administrator-installed programs etc. etc. However, this will break nearly everything – and I am rather positive that Windows offers similar security measures, if required.

glhaynes 13y ago
This is basically sandboxing by hand.