Modern multi-user paradigms also have very weird ideas of what’s shared. Like, installing or updating software is the same permission tier as accessing another user’s documents, wtf?
Super user is super user. It can always access anyone's files. Allowing unrestricted access to super user essentially destroys any sense of security.
You can very much allow only access to certain commands under super user, e.g. only allow users to run pacman. Of course now you are trusting that said commands won't leak the permissions.
I agree that it's a mess.
My personal and biggest issue is not even across user boundaries, but inside a single user.
What do you mean my Firefox client can read my .ssh files???
Either way you slice it, though, it’s clearly a huge disconnect between what is important to the human using a system vs what is important to the system itself, and the relative lengths gone to to protect those two sets of things.
To some extent, yes. If I can install software of my own choosing on basically any normal desktop OS that will appear to other users of the system as "LibreOffice", "Firefox", etc. then I more or less have access to all their data.
MacOS is starting to sandbox applications but not by a lot, and of course Windows Store sandboxed apps are more or less dead in the water.
Check "Windows 11 Security", "App Isolation", "Sandbox", "Standard User", "Pluton".
https://github.com/dwizzzle/Presentations/blob/master/David%...