On Tuesday, November 30, 2010 02:35 AM, Les Mikesell wrote: > On 11/29/2010 10:40 AM, Lamar Owen wrote: >> On Sunday, November 28, 2010 05:40:41 pm brett mm wrote: >>> In reality, I am not at all sure that a quantum leap in complexity >>> adds to security at all. Any proper use of old-school group >>> permissions can give as finely-grained a security policy as you would >>> like. >> >> No, it won't. >> >> Suppose I'm running CentOS on a workstation, and have a need to access a corporate webapp written in Flash, read corporate documents in PDF, and use other applications written in Java. So I'm going to be living in my browser for most things corporate. >> >> How can I prevent a compromised PDF from gaining an attacker access to my entire home directory? More to the point, how to I prevent that PDF from gaining WRITE access to files in my home directory (say, .bashrc for instance)? > > If you don't trust your software, run it under a uid that doesn't have > write access to anything important - or in a VM or a different machine > for that matter. X has no problem displaying programs running with > different uids or locations. > Hurrah! That's it! Just move the problem elsewhere. Oh, you snipped out a bit too much. Write access is not just the problem. Being able to upload and execute is also a problem. Can you say 'bot'?