2010 Will Be the Year of Sandboxing Apps

Trailrunner7 writes "In a guest editorial on Threatpost, Mac hacker and security researcher Dino Dai Zovi writes that 2010 will be the year that software vendors get religion about sandboxing untrusted data in desktop apps. 'Instead of the usual top ten lists that are all-too-common with predictions for the new year, I have just one: 2010 will be the year of desktop applications handling untrusted data in sandboxed processes, and it will be about time. The largest Internet security threats now arrive through malicious web pages or e-mail attachments. This is because attackers are opportunistic and these are the weakest links especially because they easily pass through every firewall. Security is not and never was about SYN packets, it is about data: the software attack surface that attacker-controlled data interacts with and what sensitive data the attacker can get a hold of if they can exploit vulnerabilities in that software.'"

Comments

Re:And the year of..

[spun]

and what exactly is the point of having RAM go unused?

File cache. RAM unused by bloated applications gets used by (most) operating systems to cache files, resulting in quicker disk access.

Sorry. The WWW is now a huge API

[Colin Smith]

Web servers don't serve html documents any more, they serve remote procedure calls from javascript front ends.