Autostart and MAC security

[Francois Gouget]

Mike Hearn wrote:
[...]
>>It's worse than that. As soon as you run any untrusted piece of code, 
>>even in your account, it is game over for your account.
> 
> Today, yes, but I think one long term aim should be to change that.
> Users clearly _do_ run less trustworthy code in their accounts all the
> time, because there's no real way to determine if a program is "evil" or
> not ahead of time. It's possible to make an OS robust against this
> reality, so we may as well start evolving Linux in this direction
> now ...

So your plan is to have ~/.config/autostart be locked down such that all 
of the following commands fail?

    cp foo.desktop ~/.config/autostart
    cat foo.desktop >~/.config/autostart/foo.desktop
    rm ~/.config/autostart/foo.desktop
    rm -rf ~/.config

Frankly I would not want to use a system where standard commands such as 
cp, rm and cat are crippled in such a way. Though if the shell gives me 
a way to locally turn this feature off for all child processes it may be ok.

Anyway, if going through a register-autostart tool is to be made 
mandatory, it should at least provide the following functionality:
  * add an entry
    Example: register-autostart --add foo.desktop
  * remove an entry
    Example: register-autostart --del foo.desktop
  * get a list of the entries and return their full path so an 
application can read them
    Example: register-autostart --list
             /home/user/.config/autostart/foo.desktop
             /home/user/.config/autostart/bar.desktop

-- 
Francois Gouget
fgouget at codeweavers.com