Clearly desktops need to be able to run arbitrary code. That’s what they’re there for.
Why wouldn’t eliminating the CWD from the DLL search order fix the problem? I asked Microsoft about this ( http://blogs.pcmag.com/securitywatch/2010/08/list_of_dll_vulnerability_wind.php) and they said the obvious answer, that it would break too many customer installations. And I guess it would break a bunch of them, but there really isn’t a good reason for anyone to load a DLL from the CWD, is there? I think they dropped the ball on this at Vista time. They made so many other changes for security reasons then that forced users and developers to change practice that this one wouldn’t have been such a big stink. And they’ve known about the basic problem for 10 years (and should have known earlier, since it was a UNIX attack beforehand).
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