171–180 of 355 posts
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Beware that VMs are not necessarily secure. They can be escaped!
This argument is similar to "a condom can always break". Technically you are correct, but I'd still use one.
I've become increasingly paranoid lately, given that things like these happen and major bugs are uncovered in software that I use almost every day. It's good that the Transmission developer reacted quickly and made waves so that people can at least be aware that they might have been exposed.. But I wonder how many more applications from the hundreds that I have installed on my machines contain weird stuff - either in…
"Open source software is especially vulnerable to this kind of stuff." I'm not sure I follow on this front. Proprietary software could be compromised (whether intentionally by the vendor or unintentionally by some outsider working on the software) effectively forever with no one noticing. At least with OSS, the number of eyes on the source makes it less likely that an exploit will exist for long (though the definitio…
The risk is not in the sources, but in the server which hosts the installers. A hacker could just build the software from sources (adding his backdoor) and replace the original installers with his own.
I've become increasingly paranoid lately, given that things like these happen and major bugs are uncovered in software that I use almost every day. It's good that the Transmission developer reacted quickly and made waves so that people can at least be aware that they might have been exposed.. But I wonder how many more applications from the hundreds that I have installed on my machines contain weird stuff - either in…
> "Open source software is especially vulnerable to this kind of stuff." I am sorry, what? Why would open source contain more bugs/hacks than closed source specifically? It is more often in the news for few reasons, including that many projects are widely used. However it's against any PR from companies to have their security issues disclosed like they are in open source so they try to minimize the exposure. See [1]…
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No, it wasn’t: “ The two KeRanger infected Transmission installers were signed with a legitimate certificate issued by Apple. The developer ID in this certificate is “POLISAN BOYA SANAYI VE TICARET ANONIM SIRKETI (Z7276PX673)”, which was different from the developer ID used to sign previous versions of the Transmission installer. In the code signing information, we found that these installers were generated and signe…
> which was different from the developer ID used to sign previous versions of the Transmission installer and that didn't ring any alarm bells?
“And according to the analysis, this is exactly what they did. They used a different cert to sign their malware. I have to admit that Windows' UAC is better in that regard, as it shows the signees name. But of course this is only useful if you know the "right" name.”
“Yeah, I think this is a major issue on OS X. For the average user it is impossible to tell who signed an app, if it is sandboxed, and what permissions it has. Hell, using the codesign command to extract entitlements from all binaries in a package is hard even for advanced users... (There is third party tool named RB App Checker which does make these tasks a bit easier, though)”
…in this comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11234966
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No, it wasn’t: “ The two KeRanger infected Transmission installers were signed with a legitimate certificate issued by Apple. The developer ID in this certificate is “POLISAN BOYA SANAYI VE TICARET ANONIM SIRKETI (Z7276PX673)”, which was different from the developer ID used to sign previous versions of the Transmission installer. In the code signing information, we found that these installers were generated and signe…
> which was different from the developer ID used to sign previous versions of the Transmission installer and that didn't ring any alarm bells?
[0]: https://forum.transmissionbt.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=17835
It is updated and at 2.92 now, also [3].
(I'm one of the maintainers of Homebrew Cask)
[1] https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask
[2] https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask/issues/19504#issue...
All that stuff - bittorrent, soulseek, calibre etc - lives in a vm, with access to the host only via samba shares. I'll decide what you see and where you can write. Yes, it's great you download stuff. No, you can't write to the stuff I'm sharing. Yes, having a web-server serving up books to the outside world is great. No, you can't serve up anything from my filesystem to anyone who feels like it. When you can't (be b…
While we're here, can anyone recommend a good antivirus for OSX? I've just been looking at BitDefender, which looks promising, but would rather get this right than faff around with potentially crappy AV tools.
This is a good illustration of why you should not install apps as administrator. Specifically, you should not install Mac OS packages, which allow for arbitrary pre- and post- install scripts to be executed as root. Same is true for Windows and Linux. There are privilege escalation bugs in any OS, but it is usually not a given. Throw the application into ~/Applications as a Mac bundle, worst that will happen is your…
I think it's a poor illustration. You could install and run this app as a regular user (and never escalate to administrator) and the app's bundled malware would still absolutely destroy anything of value on your computer. It's the stuff inside $HOME (and $HOME/Documents) that's valuable. Not system binaries in {/bin,/sbin,/Applications} that can be re-downloaded in a second. The problem is that any non-sandboxed app…
Second, most malware requires and counts on having admin privileges on target machine. The task of auditing, cleaning and finding out that malware is present is significantly easier if malware is limited to a non-privileged account. With malware running as a non-privileged user you still have to clean up and recover, but you can easily switch an account, compare, audit and trace. The anti-malware tools also still have a chance when OS is not compromised, otherwise it's all lost the moment you ran a malicious post-install script.
The more common problem, however, is a regular app install. The goal of the application packager is to make their application work first, and preserve your environment second. So, in many cases even not malware does bad things to your OS. The scripts are usually written by devs that are fairly clueless, which leads to some pretty awful stuff in them. Almost 100% of the time the install/uninstall action is not idempotent, although it should be.
What really needs to happen is a shift in a mentality that accepts the idea that apps need to be installed as an administrator (unless the apps are a part of the main OS distro).
All that stuff - bittorrent, soulseek, calibre etc - lives in a vm, with access to the host only via samba shares. I'll decide what you see and where you can write. Yes, it's great you download stuff. No, you can't write to the stuff I'm sharing. Yes, having a web-server serving up books to the outside world is great. No, you can't serve up anything from my filesystem to anyone who feels like it. When you can't (be b…