Rob Franco, lead program manager for IE Security at Microsoft, confirmed in a blog entry on Thursday that IE7 for Longhorn will contain a feature called 'low-rights', which essentially removes admin rights so that the system will not allow unknown applications, such as spyware and other potentially dangerous code, to be installed without express permission from the user.
"When users run programs with limited user privileges, they are safer from attack than when they run with administrator privileges because Windows can restrict the malicious code from taking damaging actions... Any programs that the user downloads and runs will be limited by User Account Protection, unless the user explicitly gives the program Administrator privileges," said Franco.
Franco said that by restricting admin rights for Web surfers, users will be protected even if a malicious Web site tries to exploit a vulnerability in the browser.
"The Web site's code won't have enough privileges to install software, copy files to startup folder, or hijack the settings for the browser's homepage or search provider. The primary goal of Low Rights IE is to restrict the impact of a security vulnerability… It can limit the damage a vulnerability can do,' said Franco.
James Turner, security analyst at Frost & Sullivan Australia, said restricting admin rights is a very important development and one that Microsoft has been extremely slow to pursue.
"A Unix administrator would not dream of working in root as standard. We only logged in as root when something special/unusual needed to happen. It's been an issue for Windows administrators for years that standard users just shouldn't have local admin power," said Turner.
Microsoft's Franco confirmed that although IE7 will be made available for Windows XP SP2, the low rights browsing feature will only be available on the next version of Windows, codenamed Longhorn.
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