Desktop apps interoperability

[Tom]

On Mon, Mar 28, 2005 at 10:05:58AM -0500, Ivan Gyurdiev wrote:
> > ah! What you want is /home/tom/.etc/ ?
> 
> Something like that - yes.

Ok, that's a good idea.



> > Behind the scenes, the file is relabeled or moved into another
> > directory where mplayer can access it.
> 
> How does this relate to the SElinux work to secure the X server?

Not at all. X doesn't come in here. There's no reason why I can't do
something similar in non-X environments.


> Should the desktop environment be trusted?

Everything is trusted - to a degree. Can I trust my desktop environment
to relabel one filetype to one other filetype? For a military system
the answer would be no, but for a desktop system I think that's a risk
we can take.


> .. so what you're saying is that nautilus (running as user_t, which has
> read access to the file in question, as well as appropriate relabel
> access), should determine its mime type, or use the DND target app, and
> associate a context with that, which the mime handler can play, then
> relabel file to that context (can't copy - what if it's huge?).... and
> do this for every mime handler I attempt to open it with?

You could do priviledge seperation and have a relabeling demon running
in the background.

There's a dozen ways to do it. I really don't care much about which
exactly is used. The point I'm adamant about is two-fold: a) no generic
directories accesable by anyone and their dog - b) explicit transfers
through user interaction are a good idea. Not everything should be
transparent. Firefox's "hey, you downloaded this .exe from the 'net,
you sure you really wanna run it?" is a _good_ idea.



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