- From: Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+w3c@gmail.com>
- Date: Wed, 29 Jul 2009 18:06:46 -0400
On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 1:39 PM, Drew Wilson<atwilson at google.com> wrote: > Agreed that this is a big deal, and is a problem I hadn't considered > previously. I would assume that browser malware detection would blacklist > these sites, but I hate to lean on some magical malware detection > infrastructure too heavily. This seems like an issue that Apple and > Microsoft have dealt with for years in their OS offerings - how do they > handle this? Why have they dealt with it? We're talking about trying to break out of a sandbox, by running code persistently in the sandbox until an exploit is discovered and you can push out appropriate code to all infected sandboxes. I don't see any parallel situation for general-purpose operating systems. Not much is run sandboxed on Windows or Mac. If you get any unsandboxed code running, then your exploit is finished. Theoretically someone could get unprivileged code running on a normal OS, then wait for a privilege escalation exploit to come along and get root access then. But it's rare that a hacker will care about getting administrative access. With user-level access you can still steal private data (probably all of it on a single-user machine) and use pretty much any system resources you like. The only thing unprivileged access won't give you is the ability to freely interfere with other users on the machine -- it doesn't stop you from joining a botnet.
Received on Wednesday, 29 July 2009 15:06:46 UTC