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Intel Demos McAfee Social Protection

Posted by samzenpus on from the protect-ya-neck dept.

MojoKid writes "During the Day Two keynote address at Intel Developer's Forum, Renee James, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Intel's Software & Services Group, talked about software development, security and services in an 'age of transparent computing.' During the security-centric portion of the keynote, James brought out a rep from Intel's McAfee division to show off a beta release of their McAfee Social Protection app. If you're unfamiliar, McAfee Social Protection is a soon to be released app and browser plug-in for Facebook that gives users the ability to securely share their photos. As it stands today, if you upload a photo to Facebook, anyone viewing that photo can simply download it or take a screen capture and alter or share it wherever they want, however they want. With McAfee Social Protection installed though, users viewing your images will not be able to copy or capture them. In quick testing, various attempts with utilities like Hypersnap, Snagit or a simple print screen operation to circumvent the technology only resulted in a black screen appearing in the grab. Poking around at browser image caches resulted in finding stored images that were watermarked with the McAfee Security logo."

5 of 183 comments (clear)

  1. Pointless by Robadob · · Score: 3, Interesting

    So it prevents the person with McAfee Social Protection installed from saving images from Facebook? I don't get the purpose of this, unless they expect it to become government mandated to be installed on all computers.

  2. Dump the Framebuffer? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    FRAPS (a game recording tool) can take screenshots of the raw framebuffer contents.

    They really haven't thought this through, but I spose it would stop causal copying.

  3. Re:Analog hole by Martin+Blank · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Even better: running it in a virtual machine and taking a screenshot of the VM console.

    --
    You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
  4. Re:Analog hole by TranquilVoid · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Precisely, it's a borderline useless idea that requires too much integration with a single company for it to catch on. I gather this works by requiring the app to even view the photos, so this makes it incredibly restrictive. I personally have a zero-app policy on Facebook, but I suppose a lot of people are almost tricked into installing apps - "Click here to see friend X's exciting breakfast pic!".

    Next, a Facebook app by itself is insufficient. Pure HTML/JavaScript is sandboxed, so it requires you also install a McAffee toolbar so it can hook into the OS. They are unlikely to have a Linux version and, if they do, there are plenty of ways around it. You could hack the kernel if you really had to.

    Of course they're not trying to secure an online banking system, just tap into any internet privacy fears that have trickled into the minds of the technically uninclined.

  5. Just broke their plugin by timepasser · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Here's the write-up: http://blog.securitee.org/?p=241