LaunchAsRoot

>> "… you can chown to any account anyway once you own the file …" >Huh? Sorry, using chown, you can assign ownership of any file you own to anyone else in the system (but I either have a mis-memory or something has changed. Back in the 80s, on HP-UX at least, chown could be executed by anyone but only worked on files you owned, whereas now it's only available to root [and via sudo of course]). I was addressing the following: >Run "sudo open -a TextEdit" and the saved file will be owned by the current user. Open TextEdit with LaunchAsRoot and the saved file will be owned by root. So after running the sudo command above you could sudo chown root theFile thereby achieving the same end as the LaunchAsRoot version. So LaunchAsRoot has only made it convenient, but hasn't added to the cracker's arsenal. Of course, if you can sudo, you're already in like Flynn anyway. And if you don't know the ownership difference between the two invocations when saving a file, you could be surprised (unpleasantly if execute is set) by root owning it in the LaunchAsRoot case. BTW I haven't verified that difference. >I don't understand your reasoning, though maybe we agree that LaunchAsRoot isn't opening exploits to anything that's not already possible in other ways? >If anything, Oldr4ver might want to validate his claim that LaunchAsRoot doesn't prompt for credentials. It did for at least Borlox, and me. If it indeed always prompts foe sudoer credentials (not sure how it could work otherwise), then we're agreed: LaunchAsRoot is not adding capabilities/exploits, just making it more convenient to do something that was already doable. Sorry, much of the confusion was probably caused by my mistaken assumption that chown could (still) be used by any user rather than just by root and sudoers.