One would think that Apple should be able to sandbox Preview to maintain functionality whilst avoiding security issues.
Mac's native handling of PS has always been a slick differentiator -- seems a shame to throw that away.
Mac's native handling of PS has always been a slick differentiator -- seems a shame to throw that away.
Blastdoor is meant to provide a secure sandbox for processing images and other data that arrives in iMessages. Puts all the potentially dangerous format decoders in a little box, and viciously kills anything that starts behaving odd when passed something to process. It certainly improved iOS security, but also quickly proved to be less than bulletproof, mostly due to just how much freedom older image formats provide.
Ultimately code that isn’t in the OS can’t be exploited. Images decoders have a long history of being exploit vectors that are very hard to close. At a certain point simply not shipping them is the best course of action, doesn’t prevent people from adding them later, but at least only those who need the functionality are in the firing line (which reduces the incentive for exploiting those formats, and indirectly ends up providing further protection to those that need to work with the formats).
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2021/01/28/messages-blastdoor-ios-...
Yet there is Ghostscript, which could also be run in a VM for extra security. It's a tool I still need in order to keep from distributing licensed fonts in PDFs — turning a PDF into PS, then back into a PDF, is a handy trick.
That said, using it (in a VM) as a workaround requires more steps and a bit more technical interaction that destroys the original seamless experience. Apple has been aggressive about tightening down the OS (still pissed that strace is neutered by default); taking the security approach of just not doing the work at all is really lame on their part.
Theoretically they provide the ability to do just what I'm suggesting: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/configuring-...
It is getting ridiculous that I have to run multiple VMs for accessing old programs and data; but then at least I should be grateful we have functioning VMs?
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/12/webassembly-and-back-again...