Jeff Smith wrote:
Wesley Parish wrote:
"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
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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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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