windows

Windows 7: To bother the user or not to bother?

Friday, May 15th, 2009 | Uncategorized | Comments

Recently has been found out that Microsoft has a whitelist of processes than can run with administrative privileges to prevent bothering the user with UAC when the software should be secure. While this might be a nice thing to do, I don’t really understand why notepad.exe, mspaint.exe and calc.exe would require administrative rights o_O

Also, as the FileOpen dialog from Microsoft permits to modify the file system, I think that it might not be a good idea to give administrative rights for free to software that opens files using it (like notepad and mspaint).

You would say that the solution is simple: just remove software that access the file system from that white list and you will prevent the user from causing damages. Well, this is true, you will prevent the user from doing damages, but as Microsoft has been so kind to give us API like CreateRemoteThread, which doesn’t inform in any way by default the user that its little new puzzle game is going to inject some code inside its uber calc.exe with administrative rights, it is practically possible to run anything with administrative rights under Windows 7.

I think that Microsoft will remove a lot of applications from the white list in the near future, but the problem is that the only effective use of UAC is the one that was present in Vista: Bothering the user for every single thing that happens. In the meanwhile the author of the exploit has been so kind to provide a vide of the exploit itself on his page, you can take a look at it here

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