Re: Inherent weaknesses in NT system policies

From: Kurt Seifried (listuserat_private)
Date: Fri Feb 19 1999 - 10:25:14 PST

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    >There are certain key vulnerabilities in NT's System Policies that allow
    >most restrictions to be by-passed. For instance, although Registry Editing
    >tools can be disabled this restriction can be avoided with ease, but more
    on
    >that later.
    >
    >Consider a restrictive user System Policy where the user's shell is
    >Explorer.exe and it only allows the Microsoft Word application
    (winword.exe)
    >to be run. It is launched from an icon on the desktop. This is the only
    icon
    >present. So the user can perform their work, write documents and save them,
    >they are give write NTFS permissions only to their profile directory. The
    >Registry editing tools have been disabled.
    >
    >This policy can be broken in a matter of minutes:
    
    As any good little MCSE learns:
    
    Give the full pathname to the programs you want to allow them to run. This
    makes it a lot safer. There are ways around even this of course. NT is not
    secure against a determined user, just boot from a floppy and replace the
    registry if you really want to. I haven't looked in depth yet but MSIE 5.0
    comes with it's own policy restrictions/etc (quite a few actually), I'm not
    100% sure how they interact with NT's user policies/etc, but once I get a
    chance to play with it some more I'll post that up.
    
    -seifried, MCSE
    https://www.seifried.org/
    



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