Yes, otherwise known as "if you run code on your computer, it can run code on your computer".
If a random python program can "decrypt" the passwords, that's not encryption. And browser password management isn't about security, but convenience.
Yes, otherwise known as "if you run code on your computer, it can run code on your computer".
If a random python program can "decrypt" the passwords, that's not encryption. And browser password management isn't about security, but convenience.
For the love of God will someone please just make a web browser that isn't a web browser and it's just a cross platform multimedia sandbox with a couple of APIs in it, and you can run programs written in rust or something on it, and it doesn't let the programs touch your file system unless it has explicit permission? That would solve 99% of the application use cases. That's literally everything I want. I want the safety of the browser, outside the hell that is web development.
You cannot make a turing complete language that JIT compiles into machine code and verify it as "safe". Machine code is not safe, so anything that lets you generate arbitrary machine code cannot be proven to be safe. If you take away the arbitrary machine code generation from javascript, it's too slow to run the modern web.
iOS is not exactly safe until I can use it without knowing my apple password.
All we want is to get rid of the possibility of an application developer including evil code.
We could have a fully interpreted language layer running on a platform that never lets application code touch the file system. How do applications do fast stuff like GUI then? You just have a package manager with libraries that can do low-level stuff but are vetted so they don't expose APIs that let application code interact with the file system. That way in order to exploit an user's computer you need to exploit a flaw in a library thousands of other programmers use instead of just importing std io.
A lot of security seems geared toward server environments where you are only dealing with code you fully trust in, like the left-pad library. If bad code broke your server, you could really just load a backup. But most of people using computers are on their personal computers, a majority of them have no backup, and they are downloading and running random programs all the time. It makes it harder for both desktop application developers and their users if there isn't a sandboxing layer in the middle. It's probably one of the factors that is killing desktop apps in first place since most users can trust a website that is an image editor but fewer would install an image editor because it can contain a cryptominer, or a ransonware, or a virus, or whatever.
An absence of turing completeness and JIT compilation is neither necessary (see sandboxing) nor sufficient (see variousexploits against media codecs, PDF parsers etc.) to ensure safe processing of untrusted data, whether that data happens to be "actual data" or code.
You can make your own life easier or harder with your choice of sandboxing target, though: x86 Win32 binaries are probably harder to do sandbox in a working and secure way than e.g. WASM/WASI.
One could always launch any java process with java -Djava.security.manager -Djava.security.policy=someURL and it would sandbox a huge number of things (see: https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/17/security/permissio... )
The problem is that defining a reasonable policy for any modern app is a gargantuan pain -- as is the case with any security policy language -- so as the GP said people hated it and now it's dead https://openjdk.org/jeps/411
You basically can't take a complex thing and write complex security rules for it and expect success & real world adoption.
The entire point is that it is not meant to be a secure location, was never meant to be a secure location, has no intended security features etc. If you store your passwords in a text file on the desktop, that is also insecure but you would be wrong to say Notepad has a security vulnerability. Similarly, if you stored your passwords in the Windows registry unencrypted, that would also be insecure, but does not demonstrate a flaw in the Windows registry.
If you want to be able to leave your secrets in the open without them being compromised, then you encrypt them.
Browser password managers are not secure. That is not Window's fault.
Also for most normal people, an unencrypted note on their desktop with plaintext passwords that are DIFFERENT FOR EVERY SITE is STILL more secure than the SOP of using one strong password for everything. For that to be compromised, someone needs to be able to run code on my local machine, in which case, they can just install a keylogger, so encrypted passwords are no increase in security. I genuinely don't care if App1 on my computer can fiddle with App2's bits, because I chose to run App1 and App2, they are trusted.