Reliance on Microsoft called risk to U.S. security

[Zooko]

 "Jeroen C. van Gelderen" <jeroen at vangelderen.org> wrote:
>
> There is no way around asking the user because he is the ultimate 
> authority when it comes to making trust decisions. (Side-stepping the 
> issues in a (corporate) environment where the owner of the machine is 
> entitled to restrict its users in any way he sees fit. The point is 
> that the software agent cannot make trust decisions.)

... but you don't always have to *ask* the user, if instead you can infer from 
actions that the user already performs.

I used to think that a capability desktop would be severely hobbled by the 
requirement that the user state a plethora of privilege rules, until I saw 
Marc Stiegler's CapDesk demo at the second O'Reilly Emerging Technologies 
conference.

In that demo, a perfectly familiar desktop with "File -> Open" and 
"File -> Save As" dialogs also serves as a Least-Privilege-enforcing access 
control system which protects even a naive and lazy user from a malicious text 
editor.

See also Ping Yee's research in secure Human Interface.

Regards,

Zooko O'Whielacronx

http://zooko.com/log.html

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