Hacker News Reader

Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

I might be wrong about it, but I feel that malware with root access can wreak quite a havoc. Imagine that this malware decides to forbid launch of every executable and every network connection, because their junior developer messed up with `==` and `===`. It won't cause kernel crash, but probably will render the system equally unusable.

View on HN

Root access is a separate issue, but user space access to sys level functions is something Apple has been slowly (or quickly on the IOS platform, where they are trying to stop apps snooping on each other) clamping down on for years.

On both macOS and Linux, there's an increasingly limited set of things you can do from root. (but yeah, malware with root is definitely bad, and the root->kernel attack surface is large)

Malware can do tons of damage even with only regular user access, e.g. ransomware. That’s a different problem from preventing legitimate software from causing damage accidentally.

To completely neuter malware you need sandboxing, but this tends to annoy users because it prevents too much legitimate software. You can set up Mac OS to only run sandboxed software, but nobody does because it’s a terrible experience. Better to buy an iPad.

> but nobody does because it’s a terrible experience

To be fair, all apps from the App Store are sandboxed, including on macOS. Some apps that want/need extra stuff are not sandboxed, but still use Gatekeeper and play nice with SIP and such.

FWIW, according to Activity Monitor, somewhere around 2/3 to 3/4 of the processes currently running on my Mac are sandboxed.

Terrible dev experience or not, it's pretty widely used.

It depends on your setup. If you actually put in the effort to get apparmor or selinux set up, then root is meaningless. There have been so many privilege escalation exploits that simply got blocked by selinux that you should worry more about setting selinux up than some hypothetical exploit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com