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About password for launching some App

N

NAN0

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 14, 2011
4
0
Hi, Im new at Mac OSX... just one month using it, happy.

Recent I have some troubles because dont know how to lock some app (Filezilla and Mail for example) with password. Is there any way to password lock and prevent launch of this App by everyone?

Please dont tell me about set password for the user account because I cant, I need the computer auto start without asking for any password.

Thanks for any help!

NAN0
:apple:
 
No, you can't password-protect an app from launching, unless you set up another account and use Parental Controls.
 
If each user on the computer has his own account, perhaps you could move the application inside your user account (e.g., /Users/nan0/Applications). Depending on how your permissions are set up, that might keep them from accessing the app.

If you tell us why you're trying to prevent some users from accessing some applications, perhaps we can suggest another way to do what you want.
 
its kinda simple...

first I just have my account on the mac, so is the admin account and nothing more.

The reason is because I have my mac without start password because if is stolen, my app´s for detecting the thief can work. So the problem is that some app like filezilla (has saved the servers logins and password of too much sites) and mail (of course with many important and confidential info) are just there and the thief can run them and see everything. A good and supposed simple solution is to have this kind of app with a password, but appears dont be that simple... (In windows this is really simple btw)

Any ideas?
 
I don't really use Keychain too much, but isn't that the whole point of Keychain? All the various apps' passwords are stored in a "keychain", and you have to unlock the keychain to make those passwords available. If someone stole your computer they wouldn't be able to unlock the Keychain password, and so mail, etc. wouldn't work. Filezilla probably doesn't work with Keychain because it's not nativelly a Mac app, though.
 
smirk said:
I don't really use Keychain too much, but isn't that the whole point of Keychain? All the various apps' passwords are stored in a "keychain", and you have to unlock the keychain to make those passwords available. If someone stole your computer they wouldn't be able to unlock the Keychain password, and so mail, etc. wouldn't work. Filezilla probably doesn't work with Keychain because it's not nativelly a Mac app, though.
Click to expand...
Keychain won't help. While you can require a password to unlock Keychain, it doesn't prevent the app from being launched. For example, Mail would still launch. If it doesn't have access to your mail login info (stored in Keychain), it won't be able to retrieve new mail. But that doesn't stop someone from reading all the mail that's already been downloaded.
 
Ok, I have a couple of suggestions.
Take a closer look at the documentation for your tracking software. Any tracking software worth it's salt should be launched at start up, not login. If that turns out to be the case, just turn off auto login and turn on FileVault.

If it turns out that you do need someone to log in in order to use the tracking software properly maybe you could do this......

1. Create a 2nd user w/ no password. Do not set up your mail and don't save any passwords whatsoever in this user's keychain.
2. Turn off auto login at startup
3. Configure your tracking software to launch automatically if this user logs in.
4. If your laptop gets stolen, the thief will have two login options presented to him/her at startup. One will have a password, one will not. Which would you login to?
5. Thief will log in to the second user, trigger the tracking software and not have access to any of the files in your home folder, any of your passwords in your keychain or any of your mail.

Of course if the thief really knows his way around OS X, none of this will matter but I think most thieves wont be savvy enough to do a password reset on your admin account or launch into target disk mode and get at your data that way.
Good luck!
 
GGJstudios said:
Keychain won't help. While you can require a password to unlock Keychain, it doesn't prevent the app from being launched. For example, Mail would still launch. If it doesn't have access to your mail login info (stored in Keychain), it won't be able to retrieve new mail. But that doesn't stop someone from reading all the mail that's already been downloaded.
Click to expand...

Oh yeah, good point. I should have thought of that!
 
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