Re: Environment/permissions on NSTask-launched app

FROM : Andrew Farmer
DATE : Fri Jul 21 05:23:55 2006

On 20 Jul 06, at 19:36, Brad Peterson wrote:
>> No offense intended, but at this point I agree with the others - if
>> you're doing this for self-education that's great, but if you're
>> going to distribute this to other people you *seriously* need to turn
>> this project over to someone who's more experienced with this kind of
>> thing. Security issues are not something you want to "learn on the 
>> job".

>
> Agreed. My goal here is not to understand the finer
> points of security issues, I assure you. :)


Whether learning about security your goal or not, you still need to take
security into account whenever you write anything that runs as root. The
issues which can stem from improperly written code running as root are
extremely significant. I can't stress this enough:

  Writing code that runs as root is *dangerous*.

In particular, writing GUI applications that run as root is doubly
dangerous. While I have the utmost respect for Apple's programmers, I do
not believe* that AppKit was designed to provide security when run as
root. As such, it's probably best to try to figure out some way to
implement your application so that it doesn't require root privileges,
or - at least - so that root privileges are only available to the
portions of the application which absolutely need it.


*: Please correct me if I'm wrong here.