SubRosaSoft has me stumped

Stephen Withers
Friday, 14 March 2008 09:10

Opinion and Analysis

As for 'sandboxing' - the term used by SubRosaSoft for the warning given by Mac OS X the first time a downloaded application is run, I believe that the number of similar warnings generated by the operating system is sufficiently small that most users would notice when one occurred unexpectedly. Sure, you couldn't rely on everybody heeding the warning, but it seems to me that a good proportion of users would notice if one came out of the blue for an application that you hadn't recently downloaded.

A related point is that Mac OS X also warns when opening a document causes an application to be launched for the first time, reducing (though not eliminating) the risk that opening a genuine document might trigger a piece of malicious code that has found its way onto the computer.

The other main issue raised by SubRosaSoft is that the Address Book is accessible to other applications. Fortunately, the company is not suggesting the data should not be shared with other apps - a single repository for this type of information is just too useful. Instead, it recommends the ability to lock and unlock the Address Book and to allow the restriction of access to particular applications.

How would this work in practice? You'd soon get tired of unlocking the address book every time you synchronised it with .Mac, your phone and other devices, or every time a telephony application needed to look up a number, and consequently most people would leave it unlocked. The white paper points out that people quickly become jaded with such requests and simply click through without thinking, so little would be gained in terms of security.

Nominating specific applications that are allowed to access the Address Book makes more sense, but still has its limitations. SubRosaSoft points out that the first part of an attack would most likely take the form of a Trojan. If that Trojan performed an Address Book related function (eg, printing mailing labels or sending SMS messages), users would grant it access.