Thread Subject: Re: "closedsoftware"

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From: Peter Korn
Date: Tue, Dec 19 2006 1:30 PM

Hi Jim, Gregg,

To expand on Gregg's answer #1 to your question about closed software:

> Some possible examples of closed software.
>
> Maybe some things like: (numbered only to facilitate discussion)
>
> 1 - Software that for security reasons does not allow anything to access
> what it has on screen and which reads keyboard registers directly to avoid
> tampering or 'remote' typing.
>

Sun's Trusted Solaris 9 - and especially the "multi-level/multi-label
security mode" is a real life example of this. In order to ensure the
highest levels of security for sales to customers like the National
Security Agency, Trusted Solaris goes to great lengths to ensure that
applications are siloed apart from one another. Applications cannot get
access to the keyboard or mouse directly - they only have very limited
access when that particular application is focused.


By the way, we are working on explicitly supporting accessibility in
forthcoming versions of Trusted Solaris - through accessibility APIs
that can only be used by AT software that has been explicitly installed
and given the privileges to have that API level of access to other
applications. For such security sensitive environments, we see
absolutely no other approach that meet both security & accessibility
requirements.


Regards,

Peter Korn
Accessibility Architect,
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

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