Privacy

[Kevin T.Broderick]

As someone who does sysadmin stuff in a 
mostly-Microsoft-yet-still-heterogeneous
environment and runs GnuCash under OS X, I'm feeling a need to weigh in 
here.  I
do agree that letting the OS handle security is a Good Thing (and it's 
actually the
reason I recently told my PowerBook to stop logging in automagically).

As the most recent reply I've seen clearly outlined, it's quite 
possible to create
a user specifically for gnucash (or perhaps gnucash and other sensitive 
files)
and then su to that user (who is the only non-root user with access to 
the files).
It's actually possible to do this in Windows, as well, assuming an 
NT-based system
on an NTFS filesystem.  I think this is mostly a moot point for 
GnuCash, as it doesn't
run on Win32 (AFAIK), but I think it's important to note that *all* 
consumer OSen
in current production (both *nix-based like Linux and OS X and Win32) 
allow for
filesystem-level protection and, to a lesser degree, running a process 
as another
user (Win32's RunAs service doesn't work nearly as well as su).

I'd also like to point out that the alternate-user scenario (i.e. where 
a specific
gnucash or bookkeeping user owns the gnucash data files 0600), combined
with a shell script or alias to execute the su commandline, would allow 
for
a system-based password prompt anytime someone tries to run gnucash.

Kevin Broderick / kbroderick at smcvt.edu