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Comment by dalenw | Hacker News Reader

For Mac, yes and no. IIRC you don't need a developer's license to build and sign software for yourself. But you do need one to distribute pre-built software.

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You can still run unsigned software, but you need to approve 2? prompts, and also allow exception for every executable by going to Privacy & Security tab in settings.

IIRC there is a CLI command for achieving the same.

You can’t run unsigned software on Apple silicon. Note that when you build your software if you use Apple’s tools it will inject an ad-hoc signature into the product.

That seems like it would interfere with reproducible builds.

The signature that gets added is vaguely a hash of the binary. You probably want to look at the UUID that gets injected into your binary instead of this.

You very much _can_ run unsigned software on Apple silicon. At work my department has a bit less than 50 engineers with Macs (M1 to M4) and nobody complained that they can't build and run our product (using GCC from Homebrew, not Clang from Apple). But it involves some jumping through hoops, yes.

What are the hoops?

As mentioned above you have to approve the binary two times (at least), being careful the first time because the dialog popup offers to remove the binary. Also since our product has some networking to do one has to mingle with firewall settings to allow the binary to do the networking.

I see, thanks!

this is completely false, compile a binary strip the signature and see for yourself.

AS requires code sign with adhoc, minimum.

To check I did this: removed the signature (LC_CODE_SIGNATURE section) using lief Python package (no affiliation, just looked suitable for the task), checked by otool that the section is indeed gone, started the binary - it worked. The spctl said that the binary is "rejected", but it says so about every non-Apple binary I checked on my machine so not informative. The codesign tool shows "is not signed at all" on the binary with stripped signature. I'm not too well-versed in OSX system/dev tools, so if there is a more correct/precise method of checking the signatures I'd very much like to know.

hmmm this is really bizarre.

are you running < 15.1?

Nope, 15.7.2. Maybe there are some settings, unknown to me, that are configured by MDM and that allow for such behaviour - our Macbooks are managed by the employer and are intended for development, so would be logical to set them up this way.

I greatly appreciate having the opportunity to read this dialogue.

_A Mac with Apple silicon doesn’t permit native arm64 code to execute unless a valid signature is attached. This signature can be as simple as an ad hoc code signature (cf. codesign(1)) that doesn’t bear any actual identity from the secret half of an asymmetric key pair (it’s simply an unauthenticated measurement of the binary)._

_For binary compatibility, translated x86_64 code is permitted to execute through Rosetta with no signature information at all. No specific identity is conveyed to this code through the device-specific Secure Enclave signing procedure, and it executes with precisely the same limitations as native unsigned code executing on an Intel-based Mac._

Maybe it's Rosetta bins? - src from Apple:

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/secebb113be1/...

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