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Turn off Windows process ACL restriction by default.

As documented in bug 'win-process-acl-finesse', we've had enough
assorted complaints about it breaking various non-malicious pieces of
Windows process interaction (ranging from git->plink integration to
screen readers for the vision-impaired) that I think it's more
sensible to set the process back to its default level of protection.

This precaution was never a fully effective protection anyway, due to
the race condition at process startup; the only properly effective
defence would have been to prevent malware running under the same user
ID as PuTTY in the first place, so in that sense, nothing has changed.
But people who want the arguable defence-in-depth advantage of the ACL
restriction can now turn it on with the '-restrict-acl' command-line
option, and it's up to them whether they can live with the assorted
inconveniences that come with it.

In the course of this change, I've centralised a bit more of the
restriction code into winsecur.c, to avoid repeating the error
handling in multiple places.
This commit is contained in:
Simon Tatham
2017-01-28 21:56:28 +00:00
parent 54cc0c5b29
commit e22120fea8
11 changed files with 81 additions and 94 deletions

View File

@ -1010,3 +1010,24 @@ connection. It expects a shell command string as an argument.
See \k{config-proxy-type} for more information on this, and on other
proxy settings.
\S2{using-cmdline-restrict-acl} \i\c{-restrict-acl}: restrict the
Windows process ACL
This option (on Windows only) causes PuTTY to try to lock down the
operating system's access control on its own process. If this
succeeds, it should present an extra obstacle to malware that has
managed to run under the same user id as the PuTTY process, by
preventing it from attaching to PuTTY using the same interfaces
debuggers use and either reading sensitive information out of its
memory or hijacking its network session.
This option is not enabled by default, because this form of
interaction between Windows programs has many legitimate uses,
including accessibility software such as screen readers. Also, it
cannot provide full security against this class of attack in any case,
because PuTTY can only lock down its own ACL \e{after} it has started
up, and malware could still get in if it attacks the process between
startup and lockdown. So it trades away noticeable convenience, and
delivers less real security than you might want. However, if you do
want to make that tradeoff anyway, the option is available.