A number of security flaws have been found in Windows 7′s streamlined UAC—flaws that Windows Vista is immune to—prompting a series of surprising responses from Microsoft. We take a look at what the flaws are, and what’s being done about them.
Unlike many, I’m a big fan of Vista’s User Account Control. Truth is, I don’t get a lot of prompts asking me to elevate, and those that I do get are legitimate. Sure, the implementation isn’t perfect; there are some scenarios that cause a rapid proliferation of prompts that are a little annoying (such as creating a folder in a protected location in Vista RTM), and there are even a few places where it forces elevation unnecessarily, but on the whole I think it’s a good feature.
The basic purpose of UAC is to annoy you when your software needs Admin privileges. The reason for this is simple: a lot of Windows software demands Admin privileges not because it needs to be privileged for everything it does, but rather because it was the quickest, easiest way for the developer to do some minor task. For example, games with the PunkBuster anti-cheat system used to demand Administrator privileges so that PunkBuster could update itself and monitor certain system activity. This was bad design because it meant that the game was then running with Administrator privileges the whole time—so if an exploit for the game’s network code was developed, for example, that exploit would be able to do whatever it liked.
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