Disclosure: I build Vigilance, which does this.
They 'worked' when they initially just scanned files for known malicious signatures. Now they're the equivalent of a sledgehammer to a wall with all of the extra bells & whistles strapped to them.
Application whitelisting is the remaining way forward if you actually care about runtime security. That & locking every access point down to the bare minimum.
[dead]
IMO it would make more sense to run every app in its own scaled down VM, like Microdroid for Android. Windows 10 had Microsoft Defender Application Guard for Microsoft Edge, and as far as security goes it was a fortress.
Too bad they discontinued it, and that performance was subpar. I would have loved to see them develop the idea more.
How would you deal with a password manager or a clipboard in these cases, for example, without increasing friction for users ?
There will always be advantages and disadvantages to all of this. But the general idea is to protect the "core" OS, and for that virtualization is superior to anything else you could try really. Android and iOS are already built to isolate apps from one another. ChromeOS uses Crostini to run Linux programs in a VM, etc.
> without increasing friction
That's always the compromise with an Antivirus, isn't it? The logical thing would be to build password managers into the OS, or maybe even to handle them differently. As they are already done in Android and iOS today.
Performance doesn't have to be supbar, infact with the right properties and focus on being lightweight - I see 90% of native performance.
I work on this as context: https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm
Either you end up with something don't work, too lax, or just DoS the user with permission dialog.
[deleted]
You want to keep a building secure, so you have some structure of access and key managment, who has access to what and who do you let in.
Then you let access and key managment slide, your front-desktop lets in some shady people and their is a hole in your back wall.
The solution: add scaffolding around the facade and empower some security service staff to enter every room through every window and chime in on every front desk decision.
I'm not sure it's doable with current OS architectures, though.
- you need to specify the rules before starting an application. How one is supposed to guess what application will do? Figuring out the correct rules may take lot of time and is impossible for non-programmers. Imagine I want to install 10 apps per day and they should work perfectly, how much time will I be spending writing rules?
- the rules cannot be changed in runtime, for example, giving access to a camera for 1 minute
- the rules are too limited. You can restrict access to a file, but can you restrict access to a DBUS bus? Can you restrict access to audio, video, GPU etc? To /proc filesystem? To a DNS domain? The rules feel like they were written for computers with teletypes from 70s and not for modern machines.
- they do not allow providing fake data, for example, a fake list of WiFi points so that the app thinks it has the access to your geolocation while in reality is doesn't.
So it is some outdated technology unfit for modern day.
What does a user want? The user wants to be able to run anything without any risk and without writing any config files. Obviously it takes a skill to write such OS, and there is definitely a lack of people with this skill among Linux distribution creators.
A system where installation is done using "curl + sudo bash" is the opposite of a safe OS.
How much do I need to go on? A foothold on a local computer allows the attacker to spread horizontally across your network.
It’s just a matter of time before you’re fighting real-time AI-driven attacks (most sites aren’t yet). Good luck even with your antivirus. Which I agree is going to be one of the footholds that is used against you.
Either you're engaged in some large-scale testing operation and your automation already handles it, or something has gone terribly wrong and the inconvenience of the sandboxing UI is the least of your concerns.
not clear at all. E.g. on QubesOS this could be fine