macOS X GateKeeper Bypass

I don't believe this feature is specific to macOS and the zip format. I'm reasonably certain it's possible to `tar` a symbolic link in Windows, Linux, or macOS.

It is also specifically allowed outbound through Little Snitch 4 to the entire Internet by default which seems very insecure to me.

Internal drives are, too.

Gatekeeper (in a wider sense) actually is two things:

Firstly, it is a user setting choosing what software to trust: only software downloaded from the Mac App Store, everything that’s signed, or ‘everything’.

The first two settings require applications to be signed. That doesn’t say anything about whether they are safe to run, but it does allow Apple to find out who developed malware, if it is discovered.

Secondly, applications that download executables can opt in on signaling to Gatekeeper “the first time the user runs this executable, ask for user confirmation”. They do that by setting an extended file attribute on the executable. Gatekeeper removes it if the user indicates the executable can be run.

Neither feature cares from where the executable is launched. External drives are very common (think USB drives), so they ‘had’ to be included. I would guess NFS shares slipped through the net, but possibly, there are companies that use NFS shares.

Of course, that “opt-in” is a weak point. They couldn’t do a lot better because, when Gatekeeper was introduced, users already had lots of executables, and they didn’t want users to pick the ‘everything’ option after being bombarded with Gatekeeper dialogs.

NFS as a technology is only supposed to be used between systems controlled by the same domain administrator. E.g. university lab computers mounting user home directories from said university's disk servers. Mounting an NFS share (or setting policy allowing an NFS share to be mounted) is an implicit grant of trust—in both directions.

I say "in both directions" because, even more crazily, unless the NFS server is just for anonymous guest access, it's trusting the client connecting to it to assert which users the client is operating on behalf of. Anyone who can connect to an NFS server as a non-"nobody" user, can create or modify files as if they were root or whichever other UID they like. (Basically, the only authorization ACLs the NFS server tracks are for the client device. Users don't log into NFS servers; devices do.)

NFS really only works securely, in use-cases where both sides of the NFS connection are managed devices that don't let anyone except the domain administrator (including people with physical access to the hardware!) become root on them. (Or, I guess, when you're just standing up a read-only disk server to serve a rootfs to a bunch of thin clients. "PXE boot to NFS" is a pretty cool setup, though one that's been mostly superceded by streaming big initramfs images to client memory on boot.)

The reason for the NFS automounter in macOS, is that macOS actually used to use NFS to implement Portable Home Directories (Apple's answer to Windows' Roaming User Profiles.) This feature would only even kick in if the user profile with the NFS path as its homedir, came from your network OpenDirectory domain. (I believe the NFS server and the OpenDirectory server had to both share the same Kerberos auth realm, too.) So, in other words, your device would have to be a fully "managed" one—one of the very devices mentioned above, that doesn't even let its physical possessor become root on it—before the OS would ever deign to provide the NFS automounter anything to chew on.

The automounter itself was never really secured, though; all the security was in the glue determining what the automounter could "see." (You can't really secure the automounter itself without breaking the semantics of "transparent access to NFS shares of your domain." And if you're not locked into legacy 1970s-timesharing-BSD-cluster network semantics, then you may as well just drop NFS and use a better technology like SMB.)

FWIW, on macOS Mojave 10.14.6 Beta (18G29g), /etc/auto_master still looks like this:

  #
  # Automounter master map
  #
  +auto_master  # Use directory service
  /net   -hosts  -nobrowse,hidefromfinder,nosuid
  /home   auto_home -nobrowse,hidefromfinder
  /Network/Servers -fstab
  /-   -static

The accessibility options of your browser should let you forcibly enable zooming regardless of what the author mandates.

Zooms fine for me on my iPhone 7. Reader mode also works, which is like a magic fix crappy website button nowadays.

Tangentially, had anyone noticed a weird zooming bug on mobile safari that appears to cancel a zoom gesture and jump back to the unzoomed view? Quitting the app from the app switcher appears to fix it.

My guess is they want it to look like man pages

Zooms just fine on Firefox 67.0 on Android. Even goes into 'reader mode' and is zoom-able there on the same.

What browser/mobile OS are you using?

Zooming works on both Chrome & Firefox for me. (Android)

What you are seeing is the default way a website looks on a mobile device, not anything that was opted into. The site does not 'disable resizing', it just doesn't have any mobile support. The author has chosen, thus far, not to put in the effort to support mobile sizes well.

It isn't really a problem. Attacker would probably not run it on their own computer but some other compromised computers instead. It also doesn't have to be full NFS server but only the minimal functionality to deliver single file.

Are you the KeyMaster?

90 days is very reasonable for something like this.

> Great, so now, potentially, there are lots of people who will lose all of their baby photos, lose money or even their contact with people who are important to them just because of some arbitrary number of days you made up and because you feel slighted by apple.

For all we know this has already been happening since the gatekeeper was implemented in 2012.

"..This issue was supposed to be addressed, according to the vendor, on May 15th 2019 but Apple started dropping my emails."

I believe Apple could easily have asked for an extension, if solving it was complex.. Apple chose not to.

(from the information available to us..)

Being a big, bureaucratic leviathan of a company does not resolve you of the responsibility to protect your users. For all you know, hackers have already been exploiting this secretly, and being public, with a workaround now gives you a plausible chance to defend yourself where there was none before.

There are plenty of fruitful conversations to be had WRT the concept of responsible disclosure, but a fundamental pillar is that vendors are held to some deadline so that they cannot hem and haw indefinitely while leaving their users vulnerable. It's certainly a valid argument to posit that 90 days may be too short of a deadline, but a valid counterargument is that if a company like Apple cannot ship a security patch within 90 days, then their process itself is broken.

> some arbitrary number of days you made up

As a separate datapoint, Google's Project Zero has a default 90 day public disclosure period too.

Generally, it's highly likely that the (really) bad guys already know about the exploit. Leaving the exploit known only to them and the vendor doesn't help the most vulnerable (ie, those targeted by the (really) bad guys)

~3 months is also a reasonable amount of time for coding, review, testing, QA, etc. I don't know if the author was up front about the 90 day deadline with Apple, and if not, that's not particularly friendly, but it's not out of line with other major players in the space.