Trusted Plugins in Lua

As you know, you can modify the Lua sandbox to have "trusted" plugins. Well, I don't know about you, but some people that I've given plugins to aren't the sharpest knives in the draw when it comes to technical changes, if you catch my meaning. Since there's no way (which there shouldn't be!) for a plugin to make itself trusted and many people that get plugins for Lua might rather not have to modify the sandbox, I propose a flag for plugins "Trusted", if it wouldn't be any trouble. This would be settable in the plugins dialog box either by a button or a right click menu, however it is done. A plugin marked this way would completely bypass the sandbox. Of course, plugins that aren't Lua would make this pointless, unless they had something that MUSHclient could filter, like denying VBscripts access to some things with the system. This could also be expanded to cover worlds as well.

I'm sure there are a number of reasons NOT to do this, but it doesn't hurt to make a suggestion.

I think one of the reasons Windows has so many security problems is that they tried to make it too easy to use.

There is a trade-off between security and ease-of-use.

Having a simple checkbox that you could tick would tend to let naive users be fooled by a malicious plugin author because it would become the norm to "trust" everyone's plugin.

What things do you really need to do in a plugin that can't be done with the sandbox? If we disabled that, a plugin could:

• Delete files
• Rename files
• Read files
• Change files
• Execute any operating-system command

I don't think it is desirable to allow plugins to easily do that.