Yes, which is why it worries me that OS X is so causally asking for admin passwords. Because so much of this hinges on the user doing the right thing, you have to be really careful about how you design the system, and what you make the user accustomed to. It worries me especially that OS X never explains why a program wants the admin password.
What might help is finer-grained access control, and forcing each program to ask permission for each specific admin-level resource it needs, and having the OS explain what those resource are, and what damage they can do. It wouldn't fix the problem, but it would help.
Of course, in the end, you don't even need admin access to install spyware. Putting a bundle in a user's ~/Library/Input Managers/ will give it access to the internals of every program the user runs. There are any number of wide-open methods of attack for spyware if you can just get the user to run a single file.
All of this has equivalents on Windows, but the Windows also now has an infrastructure for dealing with these things. There are spyware detection programs, there are application firewalls that monitor outgoing connections, and so on. OS X lacks most of this, mostly because it's not needed yet. But when spyware creators decide to target OS X, there will be a whole lot of trouble.
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Re: Is it smugness?
Date: 2006-01-17 09:05 am (UTC)Yes, which is why it worries me that OS X is so causally asking for admin passwords. Because so much of this hinges on the user doing the right thing, you have to be really careful about how you design the system, and what you make the user accustomed to. It worries me especially that OS X never explains why a program wants the admin password.
What might help is finer-grained access control, and forcing each program to ask permission for each specific admin-level resource it needs, and having the OS explain what those resource are, and what damage they can do. It wouldn't fix the problem, but it would help.
Of course, in the end, you don't even need admin access to install spyware. Putting a bundle in a user's ~/Library/Input Managers/ will give it access to the internals of every program the user runs. There are any number of wide-open methods of attack for spyware if you can just get the user to run a single file.
All of this has equivalents on Windows, but the Windows also now has an infrastructure for dealing with these things. There are spyware detection programs, there are application firewalls that monitor outgoing connections, and so on. OS X lacks most of this, mostly because it's not needed yet. But when spyware creators decide to target OS X, there will be a whole lot of trouble.