I agree with you that developers need admin rights on their development machines, but I have witnessed first hand why many companies attempt to take away local admin rights.
When I'm responding to security alerts where developers have downloaded random .dll files from the internet, or some "troubleshooting utility" that is actually malware, it doesn't take long until the local admin conversation comes up.
This is one of those classic "technical solutions for bad human behaviour" scenarios where a small number of idiots ruin it for everyone. If you want local admin as a developer, then we need to be able to trust that you aren't going to do something stupid.
It seems the best way to do this is to issue developers multiple boxes (corporate laptop + dev box only for dev), and or use a good software whitelisting program that tracks elevations & the reasons for them, instead of just blanket giving everyone local admin on their own PC.
I think a lot of this stems from the fact that most of the managers in infosec for companies aren't developers and haven't ever been one. They really have no idea what developers really do. I'm not belittling them. It's just not the career path they took to get where they are. It's difficult to explain to them how frustrating being hindered is, and this causes a lot of good people to just leave an organization like that to find something better.
If the process for getting something like IntelliJ IDEA installed on an airgapped machine involves less than an hour with their help, it's workable. If it is not, forget it.
Unfortunately, it takes a lot for management in most companies to see why this is a good idea, and why spending that much on staff ratios is a good idea.
Maybe the better question is: how do you prevent your lowest-bidder corporate antivirus marks from marking git-bash as malware, stopping all work for the team for two days?
Developers don’t need admin access, they need ways of getting their jobs done with the best available tools. That’s a damn difficult balance to find!
It's an interesting hygiene problem. Semi-related, I love UAC, and taking UAC seriously. It's the closest thing we have to "good handwashing habits" for admin access. I don't understand how many corporate GPO defaults/admin "standard images" I've seen where if someone has admin access at all they default to UAC off. (I make sure to turn it immediately back on as a matter of instilled corporate habit. One job I had to remember to do that after every restart/full relogin because of GPO overrides. Gross.) Sometimes I wonder if there is some oath I just could sign as a developer that starts with something like "I promise always to at least wash my hands / pay attention to UAC prompts" and "I swear I usually have good reasons to authorize admin access when I reply to a UAC prompt". (And/or you know, use the GPO for what it was meant to do and enforce a minimum UAC, rather than disable it.)
(I also find it peculiar how many Windows IT admins and developers I've met that disable UAC in a corporate environment but then personally use macOS and are so happy that is has SUDO prompts and wish Windows had something similar but somehow don't realize UAC is the exact same thing. It's a strange cognitive dissonance that I don't think I will ever understand. Yes, I've heard all the arguments that Vista's first usages of UAC confused them and they gave up learning it before it settled down and they didn't want to unlearn decades of bad habits from 95 to XP, but I guess I find that a really poor excuse because I was a heavy Vista user by choice, partly specifically for UAC. Washing your hands is great, and very professional, and decades of a habit of not washing your hands isn't an excuse I'd expect anyone reasonable to expect, but especially in a hospital. Anyway, I digress.)
If UAC is disabled by GPO it's probably because of incompetence, apathy, or maybe the IT admins have just been browbeaten into avoiding anything that could inconvenience anyone.
There are also tons of companies with 15 year old Active Directories with tons of kludgy GPO configurations that nobody has looked at for 5+ years.
But "they cannot work" is implying that person gets fired. I agree that serious breaches of security are a firable offense, because it's plainly a fact that people get fired over them.
Generally, though, developers are fairly hard to replace and anyone who is hard to replace is equivalently hard to fire.
So most security policies have to work out some kind of compromise between those competing interests.
What problem are you solving by making work for devs range from "incredibly hard" to "outright impossible" via taking admin privileges away? Surely you must understand that all things should be in balance, that security isn't the sole goal of an organization but rather an important consideration in the overall structure.
Are you attempting to create a tech "solution" to a hiring problem? You aren't going to succeed.
I went somewhere else where we had locked down machines. I am never, ever, ever going back to a place like that. Fuck working in that kind of environment.
Also, if a compromised machine on the internal network destroys your company's security assumptions, then there must not have much defense in depth.
If you have downloaded a trojaned "super library" and put it to your build process, it will, by definition, be in the same security domain as your source code.
Unless you audit all file accesses and outgoing internet access, you won't be able to prevent code exfiltration.
Issues with trust imply greater problems in the workplace. Unless you're in a high-risk (of hacking) industry, like military, treating adults like children is a huge problem.
Granted, there are plenty of ways around these limitations. By now, all of my "I need admin rights" development is performed within a VM.
You can propose such a thing. If you're in charge at a company, you might get to implement it. But if you do, know that it's a huge black mark against your company. I've seen how these whitelists work in practice. They're massive wastes of time. They get in the way of actually doing one's job, as creative work can't be constrained and approved in advance by some committee with a ten-business-day turnaround on getting some damn file conversion utility to run.
The golden rule of "security product" culture is this: inconvenience is a feature, not a bug, since friction reminds people that the infosec group exists. When it comes to stuff like this, all the incentives are lined up to just inconvenience people, not protect them. We ought to protect data, not code.
Code is more dangerous than data. Personally, I'd be most worried by someone getting a virus that hacks into other computers and encrypts them and/or wrecks the network. Both can be protected against, first by cold backups and second by resilient / disaster recovery network, but both would also severely affect the company for a few days, so I'd rather avoid them.
Losing data is bad for the business. A random box had software crashing? Just replace the box.
At a few places, I experimented with running Windows. Every time, the Windows machine came with Bit9 or some other performance-killing compatibility-breaking security "solution" that made the system unusable. Windows is a great operating system. What IT departments do to Windows turns it into a nightmare.
These same places all had a much lighter touch on Linux VMs, desktops, and laptops, so clearly the invasive "security product" mindset was just contained to the Windows (and in one instance, macOS) groups.
When this started happening, I thought that I had installed some malware. In the process of debugging the problem, I ended up finding & disabling the root kit through trial and error. When my machine started working properly again, I came to understand I had disabled the corporate security "malware". I reported the problem to corporate just as others started to report having the same slowdown error. They told me the vendor of the software was impressed I had been able to find it, let alone disable it. I believe their words were "you shouldn't have been able to do that".
I didn't get into any trouble. By reporting the problem, I actually helped kickstart the removal of that software from anyone's laptop where shell access was required. The vendor never could fix the performance problem, and eventually our company resorted to trusting the developers again.
That's a great bumper sticker.
There are so many cases you find of people's Windows complaints where the questions are "Why does Windows even allow GPO to hurt users that badly?" and "Why does your IT staff hate you so much personally that they configured Windows into that particular contortion?"
The Unix world has decades of tales of the "sysadmin from hell" / BOFH, of course, but something about Windows administration just seems to elevate to almost universal "art form" across every company, but at the same time has managed to make it "business as usual" rule rather than the to-be-irked-by exception. On no other operating system would that level of IT micromanagement and terrible "security products" be accepted, and on just about no other platform would people just as easily assume it to be OS "bugs" or "inabilities" rather than the forced masochism of some local BOFH.
Typically its because the GPO configuration has 15 years of kludge and your IT department is under resourced and doesn't have the ability to spend 6 months sifting through and testing all of it.
In Windows environments group policy is often one of the biggest piles of technical debt.
But a big problem is how cult-like certain GPO setups have become. Asking my IT Department casually, 90% of the worst GPO settings we enforce at my current job are "mandated" in the agreements and contracts with a certain, supposedly prophetic (but unarguably profiteer) vendor of over-priced databases and accounting software "to keep their software working as intended". (Which may be quite accurate if their software is truly intended for the slow torture they provide from a user's perspective.)
And bring some cookies for the grumpy security guy that will make himself heard shortly after the request is permitted by the boss.
As long as one has admin access in the VM of course!
These are the same devs who install random things with curl|sudo bash right? Or write code that can only run as root in production?
No thanks. These days of virtualenvs and similar, only incompetent devs insist on being root too. In fact, this will make an excellent interview question, thanks!
I've worked at companies where even being able to install something simple like Notepad++ or VSCode was turned into a major chore or made impossible thanks to the locked down environment.
Locking down trivially important system preferences like your desktop background is another example of just plain annoying management that I've witnessed.
Don't forget corporate network content blocking, and I don't mean the obviously not safe for work content, but companies acting as the productivity police e.g. blocking Twitter and YouTube just because they don't trust you enough to not slack off at work, and furthermore not trusting your supervisor to be competent enough to determine whether or not you've been productive enough lately.
https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/notepad-7.3.3-fix-cia-hac...
As both developer and a systems administrator, I am constantly on both sides of the fence. I have seen developers who cannot even maintain their machines and download any random thing to streamline their job to the detriment of security. Yet, I have seen other organizations where it takes months to get something like VSCode installed (try keeping that up-to-date on an air-gapped machine, that isn't connected to the internet... or ... Node.js or... full Visual Studio...)
> It's not a vulnerability/security issue in Notepad++
Outcome from a security perspective was the same.
Nothing at the referenced URL corroborates how you are representing the referenced URL.
According to the URL, the CIA was replacing one of Notepad++'s components w/ another in order to run code on the user's system and stay hidden. Nothing in that links indicates that that replacement is done through any breach in security in Notepad++ itself, and AFAICT, they're using it merely as a good hiding place. The Notepad++ announcement fixes no particular bugs, but merely signs the code.
"It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway": https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060508-22/?p=31...
I'd also say that the CIA is probably not within the threat model of most companies. (If they had one.)
No, it wasn't either. The security "issue" was that a shared library loaded by Notepad++ could be replaced with a compromised one. At no point did either Notepad++ or the library authors distribute a compromised version of that library.
Being able to replace shared libraries is not a security issue, it's the number one (or number two, depending on who you ask) reason for having shared libraries in the first place. It's like saying that if I compiled a custom version of glibc and installed it on a computer, the entirety of the GNU ecosystem was compromised.