FW: Image Unique Identifier

David T. Lewis lewis at mail.msen.com
Thu Aug 24 11:32:06 UTC 2006


On Wed, Aug 23, 2006 at 11:38:51PM -0400, Ron Teitelbaum wrote:
> Hi David,
> 
> Thank you that is very helpful.  I was just looking at files because in my
> reading there were a lot of references about storing encrypted information
> in a file that has OS Access Control.  I didn't see a way to change the
> security parameters of a file.  Do we have that somewhere, is it planned.  I
> want to be able to set the access rights for the file to be the currently
> logged in user only.

We do not have it, and it is not planned. File access control is very
platform-specific, so it would be difficult to implement in a way that you
could rely on for all platforms.

Technically, it would be trivial to add a #primitiveChmod method to the
OSProcessPlugin (there are lots of similar file system prims in OSPP,
I just didn't happen to include chmod). But that immediately leads to
to two problems. OSPP itself intruduces lots of security holes (precisely
because it is designed to open up access to the operating system),
and it is normally included only with Unix based VMs (it is available
for Windows also, but you have to build your own VM and plugins to
get it).

If you are doing your own plugin to implement some security features,
then you could borrow the relevant code from OSPP for a file system
primitive, and adapt it to call chmod(). That would give you a more
controlled implementation that might serve your needs. But overall
I am inclined to think that relying on file system features will
turn out to be more trouble than it is worth.

Hope this helps,
Dave




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