Comment by EvilTerran | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EvilTerran | Hacker News Reader

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That very page acknowledges your concern & presents their counterargument - namely, they consider security software to be part of the Windows model, and expect that to intervene in the case of modified binaries:

> By baking the signing requirement into the executable these programs will either have to submit to our review process or take the blatant malware step of replacing or altering Firefox. We are sure some will take that step, but it won’t be an attractive option for a Fortune 500 plugin vendor, popular download sites, or the laptop vendor involved in distributing Superfish. For the ones who do, we hope that modifying another program’s executable code is blatant enough that security software vendors will take action and stop letting these programs hide behind terms buried in their user-hostile EULAs.

(emphasis mine)

Replacing FF stable with FF dev edition would not constitute modifying the program, it's installing a new browser. A lot of installers shipped chrome, this was even encouraged by google. So I do not think this addresses the issue.

In reality though, this change has been live for a year. How many of the malicious actors switched to the model of uninstalling Firefox Stable and installing Firefox Developer Edition? (And presumably updating all the user’s aliases, start menu items, etc to point to the new browser).

I haven’t heard of this actually happening.

"attack widely known and observed in the wild" is usually not the bar by which computer security systems are measured.

Mozilla’s thesis is that attackers wouldn’t be willing to go to this next step (actually uninstalling Firefox and replacing it with a different binary) because antivirus vendors would start treating them like malware.

In other words, it’s not a purely technical solution, it’s a political solution, and the success or failure of such a political solution can only be judged by real world results rather than technical possibility.

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