Re: Authorization without permanent setuid on helper
Re: Authorization without permanent setuid on helper
- Subject: Re: Authorization without permanent setuid on helper
- From: "M. Uli Kusterer" <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 00:34:23 +0100
At 15:22 Uhr +0000 21.01.2005, email@hidden wrote:
Unless the user (even an admin user) knows what he/she is
authorizing (a malicious helper will appear no different than the
original when authorizing), he/she could unwittingly authorize some
nasty things to happen. I hope I'm just misunderstanding how things
work that that somebody can provide the one bit of information that
clears it up for me.
Well, you need Admin privileges to edit an application in
/Applications, so as long as you put all apps that need to be
authorized in there, only another admin could introduce malicious
code. And non-admin users can only edit their own (non-admin) files,
so they can't really mess with another app, much less with one
installed by an admin.
> Users can use the keychain to authorize my helper once without the
hassle of having to re-enter the password every time.
How does this work in practice? How do you get Authorization
Services to check the Keychain first before prompting the user for a
password?
You just check a "remember password in keychain" checkbox, IIRC. Or
am I mixing up something there?
> That will even ask them to re-authorize when the app is modified.
> Sounds safer to me.
Does this mean that the modification times on all of the folders in
the app bundle are checked? If so, that would take care of the
malicious template substitution problem.
Well, at least it works that way for the keychain. An app that wants
passwords from the keychain needs to be re-authorized after every
update.
--
Cheers,
M. Uli Kusterer
------------------------------------------------------------
"The Witnesses of TeachText are everywhere..."
http://www.zathras.de
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