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Comment by gleenn | Hacker News Reader

You have to install their MDM device management software on your computer. Basically that computer is theirs now. So don't plan on just handing over your laptop temporarily unless you don't mind some company completely owning your box. Still might be a validate use for people with slightly old laptops lying around, but beware trying to share this computer with your daily activities if you e.g. use a bank on a browser on this computer regularly. MDM means they can swap out your SSL certs level of computer access, please correct me if I'm wrong.

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MDMs on macOS are permissioned via AccessRights, and you can verify that their permission set is fairly minimal and does not allow what you've described here (bits 0, 4, 10).

That said, their privacy posture at the cornerstone of their claims is snake oil and has gaping holes in it, so I still wouldn't trust it, but it's worth being accurate about how exactly they're messing up.

Edit: deleted post. I see your other post now.

You are right - the "nonce binding" the paper uses doesn't seem convincing. The missing link is that Apple's attestation doesn't bind app generated keys to a designated requirement, which would be required to create a full remote attestation.

> If you can prove a public key is generated by the SEP of a machine running with all Apple's security systems enabled, then you can trivially extend that to confidential computing because the macOS security architecture allows apps to block external inspection even by the root user.

It only effectively allows this for applications that are in the set of things covered by SIP, but not for any third-party application. There's nothing that will allow you to attest that arbitrary third-party code is running some specific version without being tampered with, you can only attest that the base OS/kernel have not been tampered with. In their specific case, they attempt to patch over that by taking the hash of the binary, but you can simply patch it before it starts.

To do this properly requires a TEE to be available to third-party code for attestation. That's not a thing on macOS today.

I wiped my post because you are right. I don't think it needs a full SGX-style TEE. What's missing is a link to designated requirements. Abusing a nonce field doesn't seem to work, or if it does I can't figure out how. The MDM/MDA infrastructure would need to be able to include:

    public key from SEP -> designated requirement of owning app binary

The macOS KeyStore infrastructure does track this which is why I thought it'd work. But the paper doesn't mention being able to get this data server side anywhere. Instead there's this nonce hack.

It's odd that the paper considers so many angles including things like RDMA over Thunderbolt, but not the binding between platform key and app key.

Reading the paper again carefully I get the feeling the author knows or believes something that isn't fully elaborated in the text. He recognizes that this linkage problem exists, proposes a solution and offers a security argument for it. I just can't understand the argument. It appears APNS plays a role (apple push notification service) and maybe this is where app binding happens but the author seems to assume a fluency in Apple infrastructure that I currently lack.

I can buy the idea that if you can have the MDM infrastructure attest the code signing identity through the designated requirements, that you can probably come pretty close, but I'm still not quite sure you get there with root on macOS (and I suspect that this is part of why DCAppAttest hasn't made it to macOS yet).

Certainly, it still doesn't get you there with their current implementation, as the attempts at blocking the debugger like PT_DENY_ATTACH are runtime syscalls, so you've got a race window where you can attach still. Maybe it gets you there with hardened runtime? I'd have to think a bit harder on that.

Yeah I didn't quite understand the need for PT_DENY_ATTACH. Hardened runtime apps that don't include get-task-allow are already protected from debugger attach from the start of the process, unless I misunderstood something.

I'm not quite sure why Apple haven't enabled DCAppAttest on macOS. From my understanding of the architecture, they have every piece needed. It's possible that they just don't trust the Mac platform enough to sign off on assertions about it, because it's a lot more open so it's harder to defend. And perhaps they feel the reputational risk isn't worth it, as people would generalize from a break of App Attest on macOS to App Attest on iOS where the money is. Hard to say.

MDM is the absolute deal breaker. No way in hell will I ever make my Macbook into an unsellable brick if they so decide to lock my computer with MDM.

Even moreso, not for pennies/month

They can never have supervised permissions on your device unless your mac was wiped and registered in Apple Business Manager. As a BYOD, it cannot be locked.

Whether it makes sense to enroll a mac as a BYOD is another question.

The MDM profile doesn’t grant that

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