alt Hacker NewsExactly. It's not a security hole. It's just the architecture of the program.
It seems like many people have a hard time understanding this, including developers.
Any attempt to add any kind of permissions, security, etc, without addressing the nature of the architecture (that the database engine runs in the same address space / security context as the UI) misses the point.
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You’re saying it’s not a 2 tier client/server app, it’s a one tier app with no intermediate API to define or enforce permissions. Fine.
But the filesystem access to read/write the db files creates a path to bypass half of that application.
Does the application checksum the db file and have any resistance to filesystem tampering? That'd be trivial to beat, I’m sure, but it’d be something.
Further along those lines, it was a different world when the code was created.
Trust was a thing back then. Spam was something that came out of a tin and was made of dead animal. And passwords were limited to eight ASCII characters.
And as such, bolting security onto something that was designed inherently to be security agnostic is going to be a recipe for failure.