Re: Application Security...
Re: Application Security...
- Subject: Re: Application Security...
- From: "Sven A. Schmidt" <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2003 14:44:53 +0100
On Mittwoch, Februar 19, 2003, at 01:38 Uhr, publiclook wrote:
I've been recently asking myself the same question as Adam (see the
'patching' thread).
A very concrete concern is this: Can one write an Input Manager that
spies on a password text field and then saves (or even mails) what it
sees? I haven't found the time to try this, yet. AFAIK writing an
Input Manager is not very difficult (probably like Services).
I am sure that this could be done. Of course, you would have to
install such an input manager. You might call it a trojan horse. How
is it any different from an application that directly mails passwords
? If you download an untrusted application that wants you to enter
the root password, what do you do ? If you download an input manager
that snoops while you type the root password, what do you do ?
This is nothing new. Trojan horse applications can be written for the
command line. Your best protection is to not know the root password
:( I guess people running as root shouldn't use untrusted
applications or untrusted input managers.
See http://www.princeton.edu/~psg/unix/osx/osxsecurity.html.
P.S. On Mac OS 9 and Windows NT, it is possible to write an
application that watches the keyboard and reports everything you type.
How is this different from the Cocoa input manager concern ?
Well, first off, having a similar problem elsewhere doesn't really make
it less of a concern for me on my platform.
I can't judge on the difficulty of writing a keyboard sniffer on NT but
I believe a real problem on OSX might be that it's so easy to write and
deploy a Trojan. You don't have to install in system directories and
any text field in other Cocoa apps can be sniffed.
I agree that you should not run as root. But you don't have to, because
a lot of tasks require an Administrator password. So even if you're
'only' an Administrator, you'll give away that password and with that
and 'sudo' you'll come a long way.
I'm not trying to spread FUD or bash the OSX security model. Maybe I
just want to be relieved by someone who knows better and steps forward
saying: "No worries, Input Managers are ignored by the Authorization
framework and its input text fields." Until that happens (or I've
experimented with Input Managers) I'll just keep going with a little
doubt.
Sven
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