On Thu, 31 Jul 2003, MightyE wrote: > If anything I'd call this a security consideration of Escape Pod. > Perhaps Escape Pod should try to talk to the process it's about to kill, > and get its 'permission' for killing, and failing a timely response (2 > secs?), drop the program. ScreenSaverEngine would have to be tailored > to respond to such a request. That would be nice, though I can't really imagine Apple changing a rather core part of their system architecture for a shareware developer's free utility (though atmittedly, it is a rather large and important Mac developer). It would be an interesting standard to set for a number of platforms, similar to a "watchdog timer" on a number of microcontrollers and other devices that resets the device if the timer isn't reset withn x number of cycles, which would indicate a crash. > On Linux, doesn't xscreensaver run as root? Wouldn't this be another > option here (I'm admittedly unfamiliar with Mac OS X), preventing Escape > Pod from even being capable of terminating the screensaver process? Or > does Escape Pod also run as root? This is a good idea, except for two (and possibly more) problems: a) If the screensaver engine is compromised (as it was earlier this month, though likely not in a command-execution sort of way), you don't want to be able to give the user root privileges. Presumably, xscreensaver has safeguards against that (or they assume it'll never be exploited). It would be pretty sad to have a root security hole through the screensaver. b) Sometimes the screensaver does crash. Keep in mind that since the screensaver modules are executable code (as xscreensaver modules probably are as well, though I've never made one), that's the responsibility of the individual screensaver developer to fix. It's nice to be able to kill it when it does crash so that you can use the computer again.
