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Comment by rrix2 | Hacker News Reader

It bothers me that people weren't more upset about this part.

I’m sure Apple is as upset as anyone else. It effectively breaks their sandbox model so they’ll probably be working hard on a way to plug that hole gracefully.

>It effectively breaks their sandbox model

The sandbox only applies to software devs that want to use it or those that wish to sell through the Mac App Store. I don't think Zoom is in the MAS at all (I don't see it in a quick search anyway), and a standalone installer is free to do whatever it wants and can convince users to go along with (up to and including, in principle, bypassing SIP though since that significantly raises the effort bar I've only ever seen niche stuff request it). And it's completely legitimate to want to run a server on your system too, there is no hole. Zoom simply acted as malware, taking actions without user permission.

SIP cannot be disabled by anything running in the current boot session. Once the root volume is mounted, the SIP flags are set in the mountpoint. The root volume obviously cannot be unmounted while it is booted from.

Not after Catalina.

Future versions of macOS will require signed software (notarized as per Apple terminology), even outside of the store.

What is new in security at WWDC.

Signed is not the same to Sandboxed on macOS, afaik.

Watch the security talk. macOS is on the path to adopt iOS permissions model and long term roadmap is to apply the sandbox to everything, with the option to explicitly disable it on per-case basis.

A path similar to how Windows 10 is now converging the Win32 and UWP sanbox models, or how ChromeOS sandboxes GNU/Linux processes.

> macOS is on the path to adopt iOS permissions model and long term roadmap is to apply the sandbox to everything

I do not see where this is mentioned.

I will show it later then.

It's not, but sandboxing requires code signing.

I don't fully understand the difference. But signed is different from notarized. Notarized means you uploaded the binary to Apple. Previously, you can sign without doing that.

I haven't looked enough to understand what is gained by notary. Does Apple want to search your binary for maliciousness or rulebreaking (potentially even at a later date) so that it might revoke the notarization/signature?

In order to avoid repeating myself, from WWDC 2019:

"Advances in macOS Security"

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/701/

"All About Notarization"

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/703

Thanks.

Some of this stuff seems a tad disingenuous. Like preventing debugging. The debugger APIs on Mac already pop up a password prompt, limiting the usability in malware (and actual use, like trying to debug over ssh). Meanwhile, a culture of producing separate binaries for debug and for end users (debug builds lacking optimization, allowing additional permissions) is in my experience a great way to fail to reproduce legit customer-facing bugs during development and have greater difficulty diagnosing them when they occur on a real live user machine.

As far as I understand, notarization is intended to catch malware before it can be distributed. The traditional signing mechanism can protect users against malicious software because Apple can pull certificates used to sign malware.

That will be the Mac books death.

Many open source projects will not participate in this.

If this kills brew you will also loose a lot of devs.

iPhone and iPad don't seem to have suffered from lack of open source projects.

Neither do game consoles or the large population using Windows based systems.

I never cared for brew on the occasional moments I get to use Apple computers, XCode and default tooling is more than enough.

Which is like what the large majority of developers targeting Apple devices actually care about.

The MacBook is a general purpose computing platform. The iPhone and iPad are not. Locking down the Mac will make it unusable for many, many people. It will indeed be the death of the platform, as most devs abandon it entirely.

The large majority of devs that buy Macs aren't UNIX FOSS devs, rather devs that care about Apple platform.

This doesn't match my experience so far, could you point me to your sources for this claim?

Just like you, my experience so far.

Then again, I only hang around with Mac devs that target iDevices and macOS, using Objective-C, Swift, C++ and Web.

My experience has been the opposite. Of all the people I've worked with using Macs, all of them were developing cross-platform open source software. I've yet to meet a single developer making MacOS applications.

They would better off sponsoring OEMs that try to keep BSDs and GNU/Linux hardware alive then.

On my Mac circle it is all about store apps and Web apps (Java/.NET Core based).

As a Mac user who develops high performance scientific applications portable between all UNIXen (Linux/Mac/BSD), I still can write my code pretty easily on the platform.

I personally don't use Homebrew, et al. but, I have a Linux VM which handles that stuff pretty well.

I didn't develop a Mac specific "application" though.

This doesn't kill package managers like Homebrew.

Notarized≠signed. I suggest you watch the videos that you've posted; they go into detail about the changes in macOS Catalina and when they apply.

On the go now, I will post the video minutes and slide pages afterwards.

I would not be surprised at all if this episode has some concrete ramifications in 10.15. It could take the shape of something akin to iOS’ location permissions for applications that want to run a server, or even a first-party framework for accomplishing the thing Zoom was trying to do, but it’s probably safe to say what Zoom was doing won’t be possible next year.

There is no real sandbox model on Macs if you don’t go through the Mac App Store, only code signing to detect that the app hasn’t been tampered with and to validate the author.

Until Catalina, which will more aggressively use permissions and require all software to be notarized.

Neither statement is true.

There is still the same control-click to open non signed software and there is still no aggressive permission model outside of the App Store.

There is, but even the control click will only allow you to open signed software. Unless you build the software yourself (I'm not sure how homebrew still works) you cannot run it if it's not been notarized by Apple.

Firefox was broken on Catalina for a while, even though the main app was notarized. Some internal binary wasn't notarized, and no amount of control clicking would get Firefox to work until Mozilla notarized everything in the build.

For users who know what they are doing:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/unsigned-apps-catalyst-...

  sudo spctl --master-disable

Which are a very tiny percentage of typical Mac users.

As it should be. The vast majority of users should only run signed software. That leaves the ones who know what they are doing a way to bypass it.

You mean those that after doing that just perform "curl | sh" as it has become trendy among the younger UNIX generation?

The users who really know what they're doing are going to refuse to disable system integrity protection. I paid a shitload of money for the T2 chip, secure signed boots, a virus-free environment and complete peace of mind from malware. No way I'm turning that off on a work machine.

I have a Raspberry Pi for hacking, I'm happy to root the hobby computers, not the work ones.

That's why if find postings like this dangerous. If an author is asking someone to run a command, they really need to explain what the command does and what the tradeoffs are.

The command doesn’t do anything by itself from what so can tell. It just enables the option to run unsigned code.

I find it weird that you don't expect root privileges on devices you do work with.

It seems like this conflates the notion of having root privileges with turning off security. There is no meaningful connection between the two save in situations where there is no meaningful way to control said security layers save destroying them.

For example refusing to boot a bootloader that isn't signed doesn't require your oem to hold the only possible key that can be used to sign said bootloader.

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