Pardon me for maybe being a little naïve here, but the situation you state: "I have conducted code reviews on several commercial apps which use C:\TEMP in very insecure ways to store sensitive data." That would certainly seem to me that a programmer and the QA process failed. I struggle to see where Windows is to blame for that. I am no "Windows lover" but as a working security professional, I see as much poorly written code junking up Linux, Unix, Apples (yes we have them all) as I see with Windows, yet in those situations, will you blame the OS there too? I think it is time you take the bias you have, set it aside and look at the statement you made which was concise, accurate and factual, then point the blame where it belongs; at the code writers whose code you review!. Cheers Jens -----Original Message----- From: Tim [mailto:tim-security@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Friday, March 09, 2007 8:20 AM To: Roger A. Grimes Cc: bugtraq@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; full-disclosure@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: [Full-disclosure] Microsoft Windows Vista/2003/XP/2000 file management security issues Roger, > But we'll have to agree to disagree. Your security scenarios are just > bizarre. It's a lot easier to hack people then going through all the > interations you suggest. > > For one, I've been a sys admin for 20 years and NEVER created a > private folder under a public folder. Not in my Novell days, not in my > Windows days. The only time I've seen a private folder created under a > public folder is the \Users folder, and in that case, the users only > have Read and List access to the parent \Users folder, and then Full > Control to their own folders. I find your assessment somewhat short-sighted. It seems some of these attacks would be possible in those situations. Sure, Windows is already pathetically insecure against an attackers already on the local system, but this would be yet another attack vector. tim
