MS adds sandboxing to Office 2010
Microsoft has announced plans to introduce sandboxing technology with the next version of its Office suite.
Office 2010 will incorporate sandboxing technology so that when users want to simply read Office documents, these files will have no access to other files or information. "Even if the file is malicious, it can’t get out of the sandbox and do harm to your computer or data," explains Brad Albrecht, a Microsoft security specialist on the Office 2010 blog.
The sandboxing approach is a well-known mechanism for safely running untrusted programs that has been applied to Java Applets and (more recently) to Google's Chrome browser software. The technology will be used in conjunction with enhanced file (format inspection) blocker features and validity checks to provide a layered defence for Office 2010.
