"Very Severe Hole" In Vista UAC Design

Cuts and bruises writes "Hacker Joanna Rutkowska has flagged a "very severe hole" in the design of Windows Vista's User Account Controls (UAC) feature. The issue is that Vista automatically assumes that all setup programs (application installers) should be run with administrator privileges — and gives the user no option to let them run without elevated privileges. This means that a freeware Tetris installer would be allowed to load kernel drivers. Microsoft's Mark Russinovich acknowledges the risk factor but says it was a 'design choice' to balance security with ease of use."

Comments

Re:Apple got it right

[ThinkFr33ly]

Funny, that's exactly the way that Windows Vista works.

The problem is that most Windows *applications* want to do things that require admin privs because they're poorly written.

There is nothing inherent to the Windows architecture that requires an application installer to have admin privs. It's just that most applications were written that way.

UAC is an effort to preserve compatibility while making the default user experience safer, and that's exactly what it does.