Re: disk:// and help:// security problems
Re: disk:// and help:// security problems
- Subject: Re: disk:// and help:// security problems
- From: Chilton Webb <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 18 May 2004 09:34:38 -0500
Hi Charles,
During the Y2K scare, many US Banks were required to show that a third
party had performed a Y2K date and security test on any publicly
available machines. One of my clients was doing these tests for banks
in Oklahoma. It was pretty funny, actually, because if a bank had a
certain version IIS installed without the latest security patches,
they'd automatically fail the test, because there was an app on it that
could execute any script on the server, regardless of the file's
location (like in an open dropbox).
This was considered the absolute worst security problem ever created,
and I'm as amazed as everyone else that Apple decided to put this into
MacOSX.
Here's a thought--Apple could remove Help altogether. The Help
application seems to be a hybrid of Apple's previous 'Guide' technology
and a web browser/search engine, failing to achieve any of these goals.
Instead of Help, Apple could add an option to the Finder's 'Search'
screen, for searching Help & Documentation. The Help key (command+?)
could then launch the 'Find' box with the Help & Docs option selected.
The Help menu could have links into the documents directly (using #s).
What about launching AppleScripts from Help? The reason this worked at
all under the Guide metaphor was that the guide could draw on the
screen, point at things, pull down menus, and stay the hell out of the
way while the actions were executing, but be visible enough that the
user could read about what they're seeing. With the current Help
design, the Help window obscures everything, and the user either finds
themselves with suddenly opened windows (but unable to read why this
happened) or the Help app stays in the foreground while the script does
something in the background. Neither of these is actually helpful. So
my vote would be for Apple to abandon the idea of running scripts and
launching apps from within the Help documentation, and focus instead on
writing better help documentation.
-Chilton
On May 17, 2004, at 8:26 PM, Charles Srstka wrote:
I'll go further and say that it's not a problem with disk:// either,
which is actually a handy feature. The problem is with help:. No
matter what, it is *never* a good idea to have it possible to execute
arbitrary scripts via a URL. I really can't imagine what the engineers
were thinking when they implemented this.
_______________________________________________
cocoa-dev mailing list | email@hidden
Help/Unsubscribe/Archives:
http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/cocoa-dev
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.