Office suite security is hard

Office suite security is hard

Posted Jun 14, 2007 20:03 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753)
In reply to: Office suite security is hard by MathFox
Parent article: BadBunny? Only if you invite it in

One thing that can be done in a macro is currency conversion: a simple SOAP call to an currency website will do the trick. When one has the code to perform SOAP calls, one can generalize and use them for uploads of the document contents...

So, no SOAP calls without asking the user.

Having the user confirm some actions is fine with me; but there are risks with confirmation boxes: Users may click "yes" without thinking when they see them too often;

True, but the alternative of quiet access is worse. I would also assume that writers of non-malicious macros for the system would try to minimize these questions by avoiding redundant accesses and doing as much as possible per requested access, since it is now somewhat "expensive". The system might also try to be intelligent, eg. not ask again about trying to load the same URL or file.

malicious macros may try to overwrite (part of) the box, presenting a different question to the user.

It should not be too hard for the suite to prevent this by forcing this security box to be always be on top of all other windows. The dialog box would also be invisible from the point of the macro language. Eg. an open("filename", "w") kind of operation would pop up the box without giving the macro language any change to prevent or modify it.

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