Re: Application Security...
Re: Application Security...
- Subject: Re: Application Security...
- From: publiclook <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 18 Feb 2003 19:19:59 -0500
On Tuesday, February 18, 2003, at 06:16 PM, Salter, Adam Q wrote:
Is Cocoa really secure?
To the extent that the underlying Unix/Darwin is secure ? maybe.
I mean I'm starting to realise that Cocoa is built as a loosely
interconnected series of objects. It allows for fantastic modifications
(Unsanity APE), but doesn't it also mean that no Object can be sure of
the
security of any other object?
More or less yes.
What is to stop a malicious programmer from writing an object to
masquerade
as internal to my application and I then pass authority/information to
it?
Your application normally can not pass any more authority to an object
than you have as the user running the application.
It just seems to me that no object can be sure:
A. it is not being observed.
Any object can be observed by either taping into the Objective-C
run-time or by a dynamically loaded object... See input servers or
something like that always loaded into Cocoa programs.
B. it is really talking to another "secure" object (System internal or
application internal)
Objects are not secure. Logins are secure. The objects in the
applications you use can't do anything that you don't have
authorization to do.
And similar question:
C. Can other applications just pick the data from inside your apps
object?
More or less yes.
Feel free to correct me here,
Adam
Ps I understand that object transparency is advantageous in most
circumstances...
"Cocoa Programming" has a section on security and authorization. It
basically says that Objective-C and Cocoa are not suitable for writing
applications that have more authority than the user running them. These
are called uid applications or something.
You can always write a small tool that actually does secure things and
call the tool from a Cocoa application. I wouldn't write sendmail in
Objective-C/Cocoa.
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