I’ve been thinking… always quite dangerous I know…<\/p>\n
I woke up early this morning and couldn’t get back to sleep and for some unknown reason I started thinking about downloaded applications and how to prevent trojans getting a hold. Then it came to me, why let the application have real access to the system, especially the filesystem?<\/p>\n
I started wondering how feasible it would be to modify the operating system to create on the fly a virtual machine which is a clone of itself within which an untrusted application is run. This VM would not have any real write access to the filesystem but instead would have a copy-on-write shadow copy of the real one. For performance reasons it would have to have pretty transparent access to the graphics sub-system but this shouldn’t be too high a security risk. Once the application had terminated the filesystem write operations could then be vetted and a risk assessment and “reputation” for the application could be determined before actually making the changes to the real data on the disk.<\/p>\n
Later on the application could either be manually unrestricted or, if it’s “reputation” was above a certain threshold, unrestricted manually.<\/p>\n
Anyway, it was just a thought.<\/p>\n
[Edit] More thoughts added as a comment.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve been thinking… always quite dangerous I know… I woke up early this morning and couldn’t get back to sleep and for some unknown reason I started thinking about downloaded applications and how to prevent trojans getting a hold. Then … Continue reading