Windows Phone 7 Security for Sandbox Applications (user context, home directory, etc.)

Question

I'm trying to figure out the Windows Phone 7 sandbox. So I want to understand things like:

• Is there every application. run it on a unique user?

• Where is the home (installation data) for each application.?

• What are the file system permissions in the application directory (installation, data), etc.?

I am trying to learn this by writing and running a code sample (which prints the current user, the current directory, etc.) on the emulator. However, the Critical Security and Trusted Application methods in Silverlight are disabled for Windows Phone 7 applications.

Below are my questions:

• Is there a way to print the current username, current directory when the application starts in the emulator?

• Is there a way to run "security critical" code in an application. in a WP7 emulator? Can I customize the emulator settings in any way to enable these "security critical" api or make my application a "trusted application"

• Is there any documentation that details this sandbox?

I tried to search, but I did not find detailed documentation about the architecture of the WP7 sandbox, which will relate to the details described above. I want to understand how the sandbox and security of WP7 work and are implemented for each application.

Thanks,

WinPhone7_Developer

Answer 1

The sandbox model for applications on the phone means that third-party applications cannot work in the background, can only access IsolatedStorage not the shared file system, and cannot directly interact with user data or phone features.

• Information about the account on which the application is running, because access to it is not available. You can’t even get information about the owner of the phone. The closest you can be the anonymous phone user ID http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.phone.info.userextendedproperties.getvalue(v=vs.92).aspx

• No, you can only use the API in the public SDK.

• There is extensive and very good documentation at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff402535(v=vs.92).aspx
  You may be interested in the following sections:

  • Run Model for Windows Phone
  • Isolated Storage for Windows Phone
  • Security for Windows Phone

In terms of learning about the platform, I would start by exploring the many available resources and explain what you can do on the phone, instead of trying to do what you can do on other platforms. (Even those that are Windows platforms.)