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Microsoft: Vista security feature designed 'to annoy users'
'Yes, yes, yes' clickers are "a myth"

By Tom Espiner

Published: Monday 14 April 2008

A Microsoft manager has said one of the security features in Vista was deliberately designed to "annoy users" in order to put pressure on third-party software makers to make their applications more secure.

David Cross, a product unit manager at Microsoft, was the group program manager in charge of designing User Account Control (UAC), which, when activated, requires people to run Vista in standard user mode rather than having administrator privileges, and offers a prompt if they try to install a program.

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Q is for Questions
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X is for OS X
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Z is for Zero-day

Cross, speaking at the RSA Conference in San Francisco last week, said: "The reason we put UAC into the [Vista] platform was to annoy users - I'm serious. Most users had administrator privileges on previous Windows systems and most applications needed administrator privileges to install or run."

Cross claimed that annoying users had been part of a Microsoft strategy to force independent software vendors (ISVs) to make their code more secure, as insecure code would trigger a prompt, discouraging users from executing the code.

Cross said: "We needed to change the ecosystem. UAC is changing the ISV ecosystem; applications are getting more secure. This was our target - to change the ecosystem. The fact is that there are fewer applications causing prompts. Eighty per cent of the prompts were caused by 10 apps, some from ISVs and some from Microsoft. Sixty-six percent of sessions now have no prompts."

Cross claimed it is a myth that users just turn UAC off, saying that Microsoft had collected opt-in information from users which showed that 88 per cent were running UAC. Cross said it was also a myth that users blindly accept prompts without reading them. Cross said: "It's a myth that users click 'yes', 'yes', 'yes', 'yes'. Seven per cent of all prompts are cancelled. Users are not just saying 'yes'."

Security company Kaspersky has in the past severely criticised UAC, claiming in March last year that it would make Vista less secure than XP.

At this year's RSA Conference however, the security specialist seemed to have changed its tune. Jeff Aliber, Kaspersky's US senior director of product marketing, said: "[With Windows], there is a large attack surface with a number of entry points. Anyone trying to shrink that attack surface and promote secure apps development has to be a good thing."

Prior to the launch of Vista, Kaspersky issued a report in January 2007 which said UAC would be ineffectual. The company claimed many applications perform harmless actions that, in a security context, can appear to be malicious. As UAC flashes up a warning every time such an action is performed, Kaspersky said users would be forced to either blindly ignore the warning and allow the action to be performed or disable the feature to stop themselves going "crazy".

Kaspersky said: "If the user were to be notified about every one of these actions with a request for confirmation or a request to enter a password, the user will either go crazy or disable the security feature."