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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

This is really responsible of them!

Before, I was trying to figure out how mac's would ever be used anywhere near something classified or secret for a company.

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It would be responsible of them if they had done it in a situation where they weren't pressured into the decision by media outlets.

Its possible that they saw it as a purely positive move that would improve security on MacOS and then after seeing everyone's response they reevaluated its importance.

> positive move that would improve security

That they purposefully added in the first place to let only Apple apps bypass third-party firewalls?

or they started getting security bugs from the fuzzer teams. (it's a hard problem to sanitize so many exectutables, and the people who use VPNs are probably high-value customers, like business people wfh)

Having to be told by outsiders that this backdoor could be abused by malware is pretty embarrassing. It's hard to imagine Apple's engineers weren't aware of that.

Apple gives two fucks about media pressure. Their longstanding history of giving in to pressure almost exclusively is responsive to their users, either:

- pro/dev users who act as their trend setters (see recent backpedals on keyboards and Mac Pro form factor)

- people hacking stuff where it’s popular enough they want more influence on the UX (bootcamp)

Name an instance where Apple has reversed a decision where media outlets haven't reported on.

Just search for example "apple backpedals" and it's pretty clear that Apple is not immune to the effects of publicity (like all companies)

I cited a pretty huge example (bootcamp) where there was no media pressure at all. There was definitely tech pressure, but the media had no dog in the fight.

Finding an example of Apple changing something for a reason other than media coverage is hardly evidence of media coverage never swaying Apple.

The iPhone Headphone Jack has entered the chat.

Followed by the EarPods

When it comes to media pressure, Apple is like the honey-badger—they don’t care.

They want to make it seem like they don’t care…but they very much do.

As much the community wants to think they are evil and want to purposefully violate trust, most often the easier explanation works very well. Its an oversight or a resourcing issue.

As much as I'd like to believe it was just an oversight, how do you accidentally have your services bypass the firewall? That feels like it would have to be a deliberate choice under the assumption that "our apps are signed by us, and the OS verifies that, so all traffic through these apps should be OK, right?" I don't mean this snarkily; it's a genuine question. I don't know how OSes work.

Perhaps they wanted a bypass as system recovery option, or preference, not on by default.

That could really make sense of why you need a config file and it is just a simple bug at the same time.

I don't see why half the shit in that list would be needed during a recovery process, let alone need to bypass a VPN as well. If Apple wants to claim this as their defense, let them. Until then, I see little value in dreaming up excuses they aren't willing to make for themselves.

They already have a "system recovery mode" where no such firewalls run, and only select system tools are available. There's also "safe mode".

My guess is that this started small (“we shouldn’t let firewalls block security updates or Find My Mac”) and once that mechanism was there people kept adding other things to it thinking about support (security filters are notorious for people blocking things without understanding the implications and then file big reports) but not the users who would be upset about not being able to block those services.

Tweet[1] by Apple developer Russ Bishop:

"Some system processes bypassing NetworkExtensions in macOS is a bug, in case you were wondering."

Reply[2] by David Dudok de Wit, developer of TripMode:

"Glad to see it's being reconsidered as a bug, because Apple told us it 'behaves as designed' (FB7740671 + FB7665551). And why is there an exclusion list in the first place? I'd love to know more and see this documented."

Reply[3] by Russ:

"Can't get too specific but I promise it's really mundane/boring software development stuff... like two features that interact in an unintended way kind of boring."

Comment[4] on Russ's original tweet by Sérgio Silva:

"Yes. A bug with its own configuration file /System/Library/Frameworks/NetworkExtension.framework/Resources/Info.plist ContentFilterExclusionList"

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20201118140434/https://twitter.c...

[2] https://twitter.com/david_ddw/status/1329017113709842437

[3] https://twitter.com/xenadu02/status/1329030446269620224

[4] https://twitter.com/sergiojdsilva/status/1328991480657162242

The tweet by the Apple developer has been deleted - hope he didn't lose job, and at worst only earned a reprimand. (Nobody with experience would call it a bug, when it was clearly a deliberate design decision).

Twitter indicates that he is still employed.

Inexperience is less concerning than trying to publicly whitewash the misdeeds of a corporation. I'm not sure you can even chalk this up to inexperience; my charitable guess is he probably didn't look at the code or config, assumed the company he likes would only do something like this by accident, went to twitter to say as much, then got a little carried away in the heat of it.

Nah, it's not media outlets Apple is scared of, it's the front page of Hacker News...

The amount of people reading about firewalls in the latest OS release surely does not qualify as “media pressure” on any kind of scale.

Don't underestimate the power that a few angry nerds can have when it comes to the overall narrative about a technology.

Every family has that one computer geek who everyone asks for advice, which ultimately influences purchase decisions.

> Before, I was trying to figure out how mac's would ever be used anywhere near something classified or secret for a company.

Relying on a personal firewall on the device itself seems ill-fated. Maybe it could be considered an additional layer of security, but I've yet to work at a place where a personal firewall is part of the security concept, no matter which OS. It's either firewalls at the gateway, maybe additional ones for certain departments, or mandatory proxy servers if you're stuck in the 90s.

Defense in depth suggests using controls to protect each individual resource. This includes individual apps, individual servers and individual user devices. A firewall is a single control, but never the only control. This from experience working with... government things.

An application firewall on the device serves a different purpose to that running off-device, namely the ability to filter traffic based on the origin (or destination) application.

Clearly if your kernel or userspace are compromised that's not much use, and that's where external controls kick in.

You can't determine (absent some custom network and protocols) which piece of software was responsible for a given packet once you leave the device though, so that's the (current) best place to do that - if you want to impose policies controlling the hosts and protocols an application can use, you will want to implement this on-device, then firewall for the superset of all of those at the network level.

In essence it's about raising the number of independent failures required to result in a compromise. If you imagine the application firewall on the device has its policies managed rather than selected by the user, it starts to make more sense.

To fight apps phoning home, I agree. But even the tweet linked in OP refers to a tweet that shows how to abuse the now removed whitelisting by piggybacking your traffic through one of those whitelisted apps. On a locked down system like Android or iOS this isn't that trivial, but in a classic desktop OS use case it's easy to abuse another app to exfiltrate data.

> In essence it's about raising the number of independent failures required to result in a compromise.

Sure, it doesn't hurt, minus maybe the case that a vulnerability in that firewall itself is used.

> If you imagine the application firewall on the device has its policies managed rather than selected by the user, it starts to make more sense.

That's a requirement I guess. You don't want accountants and HR people handling popups by a firewall app. :-)

I mostly agree with your assessment of their usefulness, but any organisation that handles credit cards likely has to use personal firewalls. Requirement 1.4 of the DSS:

> Install personal firewall software or equivalent functionality on any portable computing devices (including company and/or employee-owned) that connect to the Internet when outside the network (for example, laptops used by employees), and which are also used to access the CDE.

The most common place this would come up would be with SREs/Devs that have access to prod (and thus the "Cardholder Data Environment") from their laptops. It can also apply to business users that have access to certain admin dashboards in some organisations.

The firewall is just the tip of the iceberg.

Microsoft provides the sources and special builds for sensitive environments.

They work with governments worldwide and open their source code to get certified.

As far as I understand it never was Apple's priority.

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