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Can you trust that permission pop-up on macOS?

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Re: Can you trust that permission pop-up on macOS?

#201

Post by saagarjha »

bigyabai wrote: post #76
charcircuit wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple does both. They secure the runtime and review apps.

And to NSO Group's delight, they don't review SMS messages or Safari contents either. The "curated security" shtick is a lie, it does not protect anyone and doesn't function reliably in the first place. Both targeted malware and generic scams are rampant and unrestrained on iOS. Many of them are promoted as iPhone Search Ads, or suggested Siri results. The knock-on effects it has are even worse. By relying on this ga…

Apple's review sucks but you are very confused about your "takedown" of their security practices. It's not meant to protect against everything. Even well-made security boundaries can fail against sophisticated attackers, or be too onerous against generic malware.

Re: Can you trust that permission pop-up on macOS?

#202

Post by freddie_mercury »

kristel100 wrote: post #196

At this point, “permission fatigue” is real. You almost get trained to click ‘Allow’ just to get work done—which defeats the whole point. Would love a tiered trust model, not binary prompts.

> You almost get trained to click ‘Allow’ just to get work done

I had an interesting experience of this with a normal/non-technical user when my wife asked for help setting up some money remittance app. Early in the install it popped up some dialog, something about whether you wanted to transfer money via credit card or...except she clicked the "OK" button before I could read more than that. As in, she clicked it literally as fast as she could process there was a pop-up and move her finger there.

I asked her why she clicked the pop-up away without reading it, it might have been important...and she literally began to argue with me that there hadn't been a pop-up and what was I talking about.

Just like how our brain has learned to edit out blinking, it seems like (at least in some circumstances) her brain has learned to edit out pop-ups and essentially muscle memory is clicking "Okay" as fast as possible to get back to whatever she was doing.

Re: Can you trust that permission pop-up on macOS?

#203

Post by saagarjha »

hbn wrote: post #29
jonplackett wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These types of ‘security’ blockers are so dumb because they train people to act dumb. Even if they’re real, the next time they may not be. It’s like how my bank often calls and wants me to give them my personal info for ‘data protection’ before we can speak. These are legit bank calls, training people to give out personal info to strangers.

As of the latest macOS update, every app is now asking every few days if it can have access to devices on your local network, or something to that tune. My theory right now is it's something in chromium that automatically asking for this and Electron apps will do this out of the box, but I can't remember which apps exactly have been doing this. Regardless, yes it causes the exact issue you're talking about. I don't e…

Nobody knows what they are; Apple provides no tools to diagnose what it is.

Re: Can you trust that permission pop-up on macOS?

#204

Post by saagarjha »

kalleboo wrote: post #130
sureglymop wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why they don't add a little led to their laptops that would indicate that it really is the system asking for your password. Kind of like the camera led.

When they had the touchbar on the MacBook Pros, they would put the authentication in there since that was something only the OS could take full control over.

You can draw arbitrary content into it though?

Re: Can you trust that permission pop-up on macOS?

#205

Post by mike_hearn »

josephg wrote: post #120
whartung wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing I hate about these things is I have no idea why they’re asking this, and no idea what happens if I say No, even how to “manage” these settings should I wish to change it. The UX is different from the apps saying “Hey, open the preferences panel and give us XXX” and there you can see the app, the capability toggle, decide to turn it on, or even go back to turn it back off. These experiences have been why I’v…

> These experiences have been why I’ve not a big fan of “capabilities” as a concept. The UX around them is awful, and almost has to be. I don't think the UX has to be awful. The problem is just that they're kinda half baked on macos, and bolted on, and not really a first class citizen. There's no reason you couldn't have: - A preferences dialog showing which long-lived capabilities you've granted to which application…

macOS already has the first UI. It's not just for accessibility, the Privacy & Security pane lists permissions in depth.

macOS doesn't show explanations because apps can come from outside the App Store meaning nobody is checking that the explanation is actually true, but users would reasonably assume someone has checked it.

Ditto for the explanation of what happens if you say no.

Fake entries would just be a very weird user experience if the user accidentally denied access, would freak people out, and be very un-Apple like.

macOS already has very fine grained capabilities. That's what the Privacy & Security pane shows you. In fact, on macOS every app is sandboxed out of the gate regardless of whether they opt in or not, and root is disempowered. This is better than other operating systems.

Re: Can you trust that permission pop-up on macOS?

#206

Post by mike_hearn »

Klonoar wrote: post #176
Etheryte wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately many (most?) application developers don't know this either, and many of them go so far as to explicitly require their apps to be installed in /Applications, they simply won't work otherwise.

Apple themselves have a quirk in some cases where apps that aren’t in an Applications folder get mounted as read-only. Granted I haven’t seen the bug in awhile, but I also never saw acknowledgement of it being fixed so…

That's not a bug, it's a security feature (hack?) called translocation. It happens if you run an app that was downloaded without moving it first using the Finder.

Re: Can you trust that permission pop-up on macOS?

#207

Post by mike_hearn »

throwaway290 wrote: post #166
cypherpunks01 wrote: post #78

Just recently learned I should be installing mac apps into my home directory Applications, not the system Applications (as every single app installer suggests). Of course, only makes sense for a single-user machine. If I downgrade myself to a non-admin user, and install apps into my home Applications, then I'm not bothered by permissions requests from apps to update themselves. Almost all of them can just do it, on t…

If you install an app in ~/Applications, it can auto update without root, but any sus code can overwrite it without root rights too

Nope, that was fixed several releases back. macOS doesn't use the concept of a root user for years. It's there in the APIs for backwards compatibility but the actual enforced permission model is nothing like UNIX.

1. Apps can't tamper with each others files. Try writing an app that writes to another app's bundle, even if it's in $HOME, and you'll find you can't. One way to test this quickly is to ensure that your terminal app doesn't have "Manage applications" privilege in the settings app, restart it, then use vim to open a file in a bundle that appears to have user write permissions. You'll find it is read only.

2. root can't make arbitrary changes to the system unless you disable SIP (requires messing around in recovery mode terminals).

Re: Can you trust that permission pop-up on macOS?

#208

Post by mike_hearn »

nmgycombinator wrote: post #54
muppetman wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I update an app I have to be told I downloaded it from the Internet and do I trust it. Can this app look on the local network? Constantly being nagged to the point I don't even check/care anymore. Exactly what Vista used to do.

The local network popup thing is too overdone in my opinion. However, I do think it is a good choice (in some respects) for Apple to have the "this is a program downloaded from the Internet", even if it can be annoying. It might also be a push to get developers to publish on the App Store (where Apple can be more sure (hopefully) that the apps are safe). It's a double-edged sword in my opinion. I think it's good that…

"This is a program downloaded from the internet" isn't a push to the app store. It predates the Mac App Store, iirc.

It's another quick security hack (as they often are in any OS). Many years ago someone noticed that apps can pick any icon they want. And, therefore, if you could convince a browser to download a file to ~/Downloads (not hard), the user might look inside and find what appears to be a harmless JPEG or Word document, double click it and are immediately pwnd because back then there was no app sandboxing of any kind, no SIP etc. macOS in that era was a conventional desktop UNIX.

So the quick hack - make apps that download things mark files with extended attributes, and if the Finder sees that, it pops up the warning and then removes them. Now the user realizes (maybe) that the document-looking-thing was actually an app.

Re: Can you trust that permission pop-up on macOS?

#209

Post by walrus01 »

xp84 wrote: post #90

On the off-chance someone at Apple reads this, I'll repeat my perennial beg that Apple stops popping up 'Give me your (local admin) password right now' dialogs randomly throughout the day because the computer has a hankering to install updates or something. Anyone with basic skills can whip up a convincing replica of that popup on the Web, and the "bottom 80%" (at least) of users in technical savvy would not think to…

To give an example of how little thought the non technical user pays to scary pop ups and warnings, people running MacOS and Chrome will regularly fall for full blue screen "your computer has been locked by windows, call Microsoft support at this phone number to unlock". It doesn't even enter into their minds that they're not running a windows computer before they even contemplate that it's just scam content presented in a full screen browser window.

Re: Can you trust that permission pop-up on macOS?

#210

Post by skinkestek »

nixpulvis wrote: post #153
muppetman wrote: post #45

I remember the I'm a Mac and I'm a PC ads that mocked this on Vista. And now my Mac is worse than Vista. It's so annoying.

The tradeoff between security and extensibility is something which seems to be unavoidable. But the goalposts have moved a bit. At least macOS is not plagued with malicious processes like was common on windows. Or maybe I'm just careful?

Neither was Windows if you knew what you were doing.

I ran Windows XP for years without antivirus back in the early 2000s and so did others.

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