On Jun 3, 2008, at 2:08 PM, Jean-Daniel Dupas wrote:
Note that you should never run a GUI application with elevated
provilege, particulary an application that uses AppKit, this is EVIL.
Just to explain a bit *why* this is evil and why you absolutely should
not do this, here's a little demonstration which you can try on your
own machine if you like:
my-machine:~ me$ sudo -s
Password:
bash-3.2# /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit &
[1] 51668
bash-3.2# exit
exit
my-machine:~ me$ mkdir testfolder
my-machine:~ me$ touch testfolder/testfile
my-machine:~ me$ sudo chown root:wheel testfolder
my-machine:~ me$ sudo chmod 700 testfolder
my-machine:~ me$ ls -l testfolder
ls: testfolder: Permission denied
my-machine:~ me$ osascript -e 'tell application "TextEdit" to do shell
script "ls -l ~/testfolder"'
-rw-r--r-- 1 me me 0 Jun 3 20:09 testfile
As you can see from the above example, if a Cocoa app is running as
root, AppleScript combined with "do shell script" can be used by any
unprivileged user to run commands as root. Effectively this means that
if even a single Cocoa app is running as root, you've effectively
given root access to every other binary on the entire system. Needless
to say, that's a bad thing.
Personally, I consider this a large security flaw in OS X, since it's
easily possible for a developer to do what the OP here is thinking of
doing, and the user could run this without necessarily realizing what
is going on, and it would open the door for any virus or trojan to
become root and take over the whole system. However, every time I
report this, it gets flagged as "Behaves Correctly" because GUI apps
aren't supposed to run as root anyway. Well yes, they're not. But what
if they *do* somehow? :-/
Charles
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