"Conclusion In this blog post, we briefly discussed High Sierra's "Secure Kernel Extension Loading" (SKEL) and demonstrated a new 0day vulnerability that can be exploited to fully bypass this new `security' feature. Unfortunately when such `security' features are introduced - even if done so with the noblest of intentions - they often just complicate the lives of 3rd-party developers and users without affecting the b…
It's always interesting how they implement security features. With Vista MS introduced UAC which is a major headache if you develop any automated tools. But most users I have observed will always press "Yes" automatically because they have no idea what the message really means. The result is that life got worse for developers often forcing them to do less secure hacks and overall no gain in security.
But, for comparison, life got considerably better for me. I fee much safer (but not safe, there's plenty to worry about with just access to my user files) knowing when something is requesting Admin privileges, and because of the UAC prompts it's actually possible for regular users to run as non-admin and still get stuff done.
The amount of windows boxes that aren't running email clients and web browsers with full privileges by default is a huge advance for the whole world. That people aren't as careful as they should be with allowing that access sucks, but I think it's probably an order of magnitude at least better than what came before with regard to how easy it was to gain full access on Windows boxes through simple exploits. To say that there's been no overall gain in security in windows completely ignores the absolutely horrid state of security on Windows a decade or more ago. There are reasons why Windows is much better with respect to security today, and UAC is definitely one of them.