Details on Refining Vista's User Control

borgboy writes "Windows Vista has gotten a lot of negative press recently following the release of the latest beta, especially regarding excessive prompting for privilege escalation for seemingly common activities. On his blog, Steve Hiskey, the Lead Program Manager for User Account Control in the Windows Security Core group, details what the issues with the excessive prompting are, what the design goals of the feature are, and how they plan to achieve them. Briefly - they know the excessive prompting is a royal pain, they know that have to reduce it to an absolute minimum to be both productive AND an effective security risk mitigation measure, and they want as much feedback as they can get on the beta."

Comments

Re:malware safeguards

[spongman]

the prompt appears on a sparate desktop, it's HWND isn't retrievable by any application, and the regular keyboard message pumping mechanism is bypassed.

unfortunately, this breaks the brilliant synergy2 tool temporarily...

getting there...

[spongman]

beta 2 is much better than previous CTPs which were almost unusable - I had to turn off UAC to preserve what's left of my hair.

there's still some core OS UI that's not UAC-enabled, though. for example, you can't fully configure network connection settings without running running explorer.exe elevated.

Re:It's Still In Beta Folks!

[starfishsystems]

Yes, it's a tough crowd here at Slashdot.

Some people here still expect beta to mean beta, which is conventionally intended to identify bugs in an otherwise stable product. A beta release is not, as you suggest, an invitation to change the feature set, though that has never prevented Microsoft from bending the rules at its convenience.

To be charitable, I can imagine that with this Vista beta, the codebase might indeed be as stable as what we ordinarily expect from a beta release, and so what we're looking at now is just a matter of tuning the configuration parameters so that it prompts at the right thresholds. And, on the principle of security by default, the system will initially tend toward maximum prompting. However, thinking more soberly, a secure system will have fully addressed these issues at the design level, and prompting will not be excessive but appropriate and meaningful. If it's not, that's a clear sign that the design has deeper problems than can be fixed just by changing the prompting parameters. Pardon my cynicism, but in my experience, that would be entirely typical of Microsoft.

Definition of beta at: Wikipedia.

For usability see: Whitten and Tygar.