16 Dec
2005
16 Dec
'05
3:18 p.m.
Jeff Smith wrote:
Wesley Parish wrote:
since I do software development and
a little support for a living I
think I'm qualified to make this comment. As much as we'd like to
educate people in this manner (no matter what software we write) most
users will not read it and if they do, they will not understand it.
as much as choice is nice (and the open source way), it's probably
better to just have them use the secure way by default. make it easy to
find and change the behavior for those that want to, but keep it out of
the way of the average user. maybe something like an option in the
beginning of setup for 'let me choose everything' or 'just make it work'
and an easy switch between advanced mode/just work mode somewhere else
would be a good way to go?
Dennis
"insecure-by-inattention" - by that I
mean software that must run as
super-user
or otherwise (otherstupidly) it won't run at all. ReactOS is not
only intended
as a plug-in replacement for MS Windows, if I read this-and-that
correctly, it's
also intended to "get it done right". And so we can't have
super-user as
default user, because that is Microsoft's thorn-in-the-flesh, and
they can have
it. I don't want it.
What I've been thinking is there is quite a bit of useful information
and
knowledge being actively developed and used in the Unix/BSD/Linux
field for
handling that sort of problem. The BSD chroot jail is one such
implementation -
there are even some aspects of the MS Windows directory structure
that would
simplify the adaption of the chroot jail to the ReactOS.
[hardware]\Program Files\Abracadabra-Malware-Magnet\
"Abracadabra-Malware-Magnet" is a separate subdirectory within the
Program Files
directory. Chroot jail, if I remember correctly, requires a separate
directory
for each chrooted program so it sees itself as the one-and-only love
of its
kernel's uptime. The MS Windows directory structure already has this
separable
directory structure.
What needs to be done is to ensure that it thinks it's the only one
around.
There would be some sizeable problems - ensuring that the dlls would be
sufficiently robust to avoid being hijacked, is just one, ensuring
that it
couldn't make any changes to dlls outside its directory is a bigger
one, but
that could be handled by making sure it installed all its (uniquely)
needed dlls
in its chroot jail. Which a lot of Win32 programs do anyway.
What do people think?
Wesley Parish
"Sharpened hands are happy hands.
"Brim the tinfall with mirthful bands" - A Deepness in the Sky,
Vernor Vinge
"I me. Shape middled me. I would come out into hot!" I from the
spicy that day was overcasked mockingly - it's a symbol of the other
horizon. - emacs : meta x dissociated-press
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Sorry but I'm not familiar wit chroot, so I didn't catch all of that
but why not have something where during the setup it'll ask you for
the "system password" those would be used for the Administrator
account first time logging in a window would appear, explaining the
pro's and con's of the admin account and asks the user if he/she wants
to create another account for his/her activities.
this approach will do 2 things 1. secure the computer because ReactOS
would automatically prompt the user about the security of the admin
account and 2. educate the user with a little bit about how the
computer works.
"Every thing should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." -
Albert Einstein
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