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

Already here. It's on my family PC..

[Lumpy]

sandboxie... Great program, will NOT work on a 64 bit OS.

IT has kept my Daughter's PC free of crap because she refuses to not click on everything and not use Internet explorer... so I sandboxed it. Click on everything, it's all sandboxed.

you mean like an operating system is supposed to?

[Locutus]

really? sandboxing desktop apps? Look at what one of the design goals of any real OS is and providing security, memory protection( from other apps and OS space ), indirect access to hardware, and smooth multitasking between apps and OS are right up there near the top. Memory protection is WAY up there near the top unless you're looking at special purpose realtime applications or micro-controller apps. Now what we are seeing on Windows is yet another layer in an attempt to fix a bad design and one which will continue to slow down the system while pushing the hardware. It's great if you are out to sell more expensive hardware and you don't want lower end( cheaper priced ) hardware to run your software. You know, like how Vista ran so good on netbooks and how Windows 7 is better than Vista at that but still worst than Windows XP.

Sandboxing is basically what virtual machines like VMWare, VirtualBox, KVM, VirtualPC all do. Off of Windows, it gives users a way to run Windows without rebooting their main OS. On Windows, it gives businesses a way to keep one crashing Windows server from taking down the other servers and in the desktop it lets users boot Linux without rebooting Windows. But for app protection? That's what the OS is supposed to be doing.

LoB

Instead of validating inputs

[vlm]

Cool, instead of screwing up the simple task of validating inputs, we'll simply screw up the complicated task of sandboxing. Awesomeness!

How about reducing the surface area?

[argent]

Sandboxing means that once the attacker has used an input exploit to own the process, it has to perform a privilege escalation exploit to get out of the sandbox. The problem is that applications running in sanboxes have to be able to write files, read files, load and install plugins, execute helper applications, and generally do just about anything a regulat application has to. So the sandbox can't be very "strong".

Instead of adding a leaky sandbox, how about reducing the surface area exposed to attack in the first place? Simplify the application. Get rid of things like XPI in Firefox and ActiveX in IE. Get rid of the need for third party plugins like Java and Flash (HTML5 goes a long way here). Get rid of the ability for network apps to masquerade as local apps (there's no reason a web page should be allowed to remove the status and address bar, for example). Don't even *offer* to automatically open a file after downloading. Remove that option from the browser completely. Get rid of Acrobat and other plug-in document viewers.

Yes, this might make it less convenient for websites to "wow" the user. So what? I'd rather be safe than "wow"ed.