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Killing web browsers - part IIKilling web browsers - part IIPosted Oct 28, 2004 14:45 UTC (Thu) by rmini (subscriber, #4991)In reply to: Killing web browsers - part II by bk Parent article: Killing web browsers - part II
I don't know about you, but having someone delete all my personal files would be a big blow; also running other applications (turning your machine into a spam bot, for example), etc. You don't necessarily need root to cause havoc.
It'd be a different form of privilege separation (same UID, but reduced capabilities via chroot/jail or some other mechanism) than used in, say, a mail server, but the same concept.
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Killing web browsers - part II Posted Oct 28, 2004 20:49 UTC (Thu) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] Rather nasty problem: most of the operations needed for priveledge seperation are root-only. chroot/setuid/jail etc can only be used by root.
Users as a rule can't fake anything, even if for supposedly good purposes. You might fake a setuid program to do something it shouldn't.
Killing web browsers - part II Posted Oct 29, 2004 14:41 UTC (Fri) by RobSeace (subscriber, #4435) [Link] All you really need to do to accomplish this form of "privilege separation"is to create yourself a separate user account, and use THAT to run your web browser under... Setup sudoers appropriately, and then have your web browser icon launch "sudo -u webuser -H mozilla" (or whatever browser) instead of launching the browser directly... (You'd probably want to setup sudoers so you didn't have to be prompted for a password for this, too, of course...) There, now your browser can only access stuff as this other user; and, presumably, you'd have pretty much NOTHING lying around which that user would have access to modify/delete...
Killing web browsers - part II Posted Oct 29, 2004 18:14 UTC (Fri) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] There, now your browser can only access stuff as this other user; and, presumably, you'd have pretty much NOTHING lying around which that user would have access to modify/delete...The problem is that the data the browser needs to read/write can be still sensitive - think about passwords stored by Opera's Wand function (and I think Mozilla has something similar)...
Killing web browsers - part II Posted Oct 29, 2004 19:36 UTC (Fri) by RobSeace (subscriber, #4435) [Link] Well, I've always thought those silly "remember all passwords I type"functions were completely stupid, anyway... I never use them... Yes, Moz does have such a thing, but I certainly don't use it, and I wouldn't recommend anyone use it... BUT, I thought it at least encrypted the saved passwords, and required some master password to unlock them? Maybe not... Like I say, I don't use it... If they just leave it lying around in plain-text, then it's a very broken design, in the first place, I'd say... You can't really help people if they TRY to shoot themselves in the foot by using broken-by-design security-compromising features, just to save themselves a little typing every now and then... Such people probably would never even bother going through the trouble of setting up such a separate user system for added security in the first place, since they're obviously not too concerned with security, it seems... But, I'd think there really SHOULDN'T be any need for a web browser to ever access any sensitive info on your hard drive...
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