From the ZDNet Article:
“Joanna Rutkowska has always been a big supporter of the Windows Vista security model. Until she stumbled upon a “very severe hole” in the design of UAC (User Account Control) and found out — from Microsoft officials — that the default no-admin setting isn’t even a security mechanism anymore…”
“[When] you try to run such a program, you get a UAC prompt and you have only two choices: either to agree to run this application as administrator or to disallow running it at all. That means that if you downloaded some freeware Tetris game, you will have to run its installer as administrator, giving it not only full access to all your file system and registry, but also allowing it to load kernel drivers! Why should a Tetris installer be allowed to load kernel drivers?”
This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Especially since Microsoft has had 3 operating systems with this dumb security model. There is no reason that Windows should require administrator access to install an application. This is one of the main issues involved with the security of Windows operating systems. In the Linux and Mac world, you login to your machine as a user – not an administrator. That way no program you run or install has administrator rights to the system. If you need to do something as an Administrator on the machine, the machine prompts you for the administrator username and password, does the required task, and then reverts your rights back to “user” privileges. (This is basically the “sudo” function found in Unix/Linux.) In Mac-land, for the most part, you don’t even need admin privileges to install an Application. You can just create an applications folder in your home directory and you’re good to go. This is why Unix based OSs will always be more secure than Windows. Until they change the very core of how Windows installs and runs applications you’ll always have to give applications rights you don’t really want them to have.
