>An operating system marketed to gamers disables a host of Windows security features enticing users with promises of a smooth gaming experience which they may not realize is opening them up to potential attack.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...
It’s definitely a work in progress but I mostly found it disappointing when someone uses a comic from 2013 to argue against the kind of tools which have been getting built in the subsequent decade to prevent those kinds of failures. I wish we’d go further sooner but at least we’ve broken the assumption many people had in the 2000s that there was nothing you could do about it.
Practically speaking everything in the comic is still correct. The fundamental problem is that apps aren't sandboxed from each other, so once a malicious program gets on the machine it's game over. VBS tries to protect specific parts of the system, but without app sandboxing it's useless. For instance even if you use VBS to protect a service that can encrypt/decrypt on behalf of apps, all of that's useless when the system can't be assured which app is asking to decrypt the secrets.
Even in the case of windows hello, I'm not sure what VBS is trying to protect. If a malicious program is running on your system, it doesn't need to bypass the lock screen. I guess it's better for privacy because your biometrics are more protected, but it can always control the camera to capture a fresh set of images next time you sit in front of it.
On Windows, perhaps. On Apple and some Linux configurations, it hasn’t been correct for years because they implement app level sandboxing. Windows Sandbox, App Containers, etc. show that the Windows team isn’t ignoring that even though their backwards compatibility problem is much harder.
> For instance even if you use VBS to protect a service that can encrypt/decrypt on behalf of apps, all of that's useless when the system can't be assured which app is asking to decrypt the secrets.
There’s no technical reason why it can’t verify the app - indeed Chrome just started to do this to prevent infostealers from grabbing cookies – but also note that it’s still an advantage if malware can’t get the private key because that’s protected by VBS. Things like what password managers have done for years to require a handshake or rate-limit help to shift from the attacker getting everything effortlessly to only getting some things they specifically request or the first n things they try.