[ge-talk] Security services provided by OS

Paul van Nugteren pmvannugteren at eml.cc
Sun Jan 7 06:51:08 EST 2007


Are you sure? Seems a pretty obvious idea...

> Protection #2 (prevent application from destroying files) actually has a
> very simple solution which no OS really uses, which is quite puzzling.
> Simply restrict the application from only modifying files in its current
> directory or lower, but never higher.  ie. an application in
> /boot/apps/Sandbox  can only modify files in the Sandbox directory and
> lower
> (and obviously ~/config/settings/Sandbox).  If an application needs to do
> anything outside it's boundaries, pop up an alert asking for permission /
> password.  There is also a third directory which we will allow access to,
> and that is wherever the user open/saved a file to.  This approach allows
> audio players to access my MP3 directory, but never /boot/beos/system).
> Spawned applications inherit directory restrictions.


Still the mp3 player needs to write to '/dev/audio'. I think the system
should never allow it too read anything else than music files, but what
about private voice recordings? It could read those and secretly upload.




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