moko running everything as root

[ramsesoriginal]

I don't read through the whole thread (i'm short on time, sorry), but
having users would be part of a good security in depth structure. You
talk about compromittingdata, but never thing ofotehr thinks. For
example: i have acess for some seconds  to the phone. runnign as root,
i change the dns to point to evil.com, which simply mirrors anotehr
dns, with the little addition that bank.com goes to
evil-phishing-copy-of-my-bank.com, and nowing the phone's owner, i
probably know his bank. Other use case: i go to starbucks, someone
accesses my phone, and opens a simple  two-way ssh tunnel to evil.com.
Then, when the moko islogged in the fortune-500 company this guy works
for, the bad guy logs in through this ssh-tunnel (going through gprs),
and is behind the firewalls, ids, etc, all undetected. You want more
use cases?

On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 6:26 PM, Robert Taylor
<subscribers at tinsputnik.com> wrote:
> Joerg Reisenweber wrote:
>> If you have root AND user, root can make a backup copy of user's valuable data
>> every once in a while, and user or the virus she imported while browsing the
>> web can NOT destroy this backup.
>> I can't follow your arguments. It's NOT an evil person we need to fence in,
>> it's bad behaviour of applications that go nuts on (virus|bug|user fault|*)
>>
>> If we don't start to care about this topic NOW, we will see lots of poor
>> designed apps that rely on having root access where they shouldn't, and we
>> end up in a situation like M$, where the whole system is so much root-centric
>> that you simply can't switch to a sane user-management anymore, because it
>> would break half the system. To fix those apps later is a major PITA.
>>
>> I just "talked" to Wolfgang Spraul and he answered
>> "But right now we are selling to hardcore developers only, so it's not
>> our #1 priority.
>> Once our software becomes more stable and mature, this needs to be
>> addressed seriously. The good news is that the FOSS community is
>> pretty paranoid about this, so I'm sure over time we will have a good
>> solution."
>> It's a FOSS project and you are "the community", so just contribute! I'd say,
>> do it *now*, as long as it's easy.
>>
>> cheers
>> jOERG
>>
> Hear hear.
>
> I would be willing to sacrifice any future features in favour of working
> on this first.
>
> As I think about the implications of this more and more its clear:
>
> Linux wins the security war not because of technology BUT BECAUSE OF OUR
> CULTURE.
>
> It is the culture of our users that makes us safer.  Hell, even Ubuntu
> is able to get noobs to follow the simplest security measures such as
> not running as root, surely we can do the same.
>
> I say let's learn from the mistake of M$ and lets out think then because
> we sure as hell aren't going to outcompete them.
>
> Rob
>
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