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The Gates to Hell: Apple’s Notarizing

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Re: The Gates to Hell: Apple’s Notarizing

#181

Post by mrtesthah »

judge2020 wrote: post #174
mrtesthah wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how is any of that different from the Developer ID code-signing Apple had already? You still needed to register as either a corp or an individual using legal identifying documents just to generate the certificates. This is the step you seem to be attributing to notarization. It’s not new at all. Moreover, Apple was also already using OSCP to check for revoked certificates when validating the code signature. They’…

I'm explaining how it currently works - they have the legal resources file police reports for serious reports of malware, or if it's in a place with largely uncooperative police, a domestic federal investigation into the activity.

But the question is why they needed to require notarization; it adds nothing to this protection ability.

Re: The Gates to Hell: Apple’s Notarizing

#182

Post by sorbits »

Klonoar wrote: post #175
hansvm wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But your release build is not done constantly Some people (are they the minority? probably?) cut release builds frequently enough for it to be a big pain point. > and so you have to sign in and accept an agreement - [which isn't] a big deal It probably is though. Have _any_ agreements you've accepted in the last, say, 5yrs not had blatantly overbearing or malicious terms?

If you're cutting release builds often enough that the extra minute or two is hampering your productivity, you may have bigger issues with software development.

For me, it is generally > 2 minutes, and “release build” cover any build that leave your machine, e.g. nightly builds, beta builds, test builds to a specific user to track down some issue, etc.

Signing the agreement is also not just clicking “Agree”, you have to hunt for the contract online first. Last time I did this, their 2FA was down, so just logging in took me about a minute.

It feels like a lot of friction that serves absolutely no purpose, which makes it so extremely infuriating.

This is from the same company whose former CEO pressured a developer to reduce the boot time of the Macintosh (and got a 28 second speedup).

Yes, this stuff really matters to a lot of us!

Re: The Gates to Hell: Apple’s Notarizing

#183

Post by hellow0rldz »

Notarization is nothing except Apple making sure they have visibility into the tail end of their ecosystem.

Remember the days of Windows 95 when you could make an application, sell it to a person in your own town and nobody in the world knew?! Not anymore!

Now Apple has to know that you made an app and get an exact copy of it, just for safe-keeping.

Re: The Gates to Hell: Apple’s Notarizing

#184

Post by phendrenad2 »

hellow0rldz wrote: post #183

Notarization is nothing except Apple making sure they have visibility into the tail end of their ecosystem. Remember the days of Windows 95 when you could make an application, sell it to a person in your own town and nobody in the world knew?! Not anymore! Now Apple has to know that you made an app and get an exact copy of it, just for safe-keeping.

You can still do this with a webapp though (although I guess in some sense Apple looks at Safari traffic logs probably). Apple just wants the revenue.

Re: The Gates to Hell: Apple’s Notarizing

#185

Post by Svoka »

I don't get the whole panic around notarization. I maintain a big open source project, and is quite complex. It is a game engine with downloadable plugins and lots of system integration. Notarization was easy. I didn't use Xcode GUI for it, because it has one line command to do it, which is more comfortable for me: https://github.com/coronalabs/corona/blob/53eeb3e31ac09f7a46... Not a biggie.

Re: The Gates to Hell: Apple’s Notarizing

#186

Post by tonyedgecombe »

judge2020 wrote: post #153
nly wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On this note, does HN know where to acquire the cheapest possible code signing cert for Windows?

The cheapest base code signing certificate will be via a Sectigo (formerly Comodo, although they allow resellers to advertise either brand) reseller. I'm not affiliated with this site beyond being a customer, but the website 'codesigncert.com' is the absolute cheapest i've found for Windows signing (EV 3 years: $219/yr [0] / regular 3 years: $59/yr [1]). Note that this landscape might change in the future. Microsoft…

I just renewed a certificate using Sectigo, it was a painful experience.

Re: The Gates to Hell: Apple’s Notarizing

#187

Post by judge2020 »

mrtesthah wrote: post #181
judge2020 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm explaining how it currently works - they have the legal resources file police reports for serious reports of malware, or if it's in a place with largely uncooperative police, a domestic federal investigation into the activity.

But the question is why they needed to require notarization; it adds nothing to this protection ability.

That’s been discussed a lot elsewhere in the thread. The parent of my comment specially talks about how any barrier to entry (My add: especially legal/criminal ones) deters most unsophisticated/undedicated attackers from widely distributing malware.

Re: The Gates to Hell: Apple’s Notarizing

#188

Post by lytefm »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #155

Is Apple hostile towards developers? Probably not, but it sometimes feels like it. This is weird.

Maybe not outright hostile, but they don't care about developer experience. It's more like: "You want you App on our OS? Go figure it out."

Currently I'm annoyed by a long known bug that requires to manually confirm 50+ popups with username and password whenever signing an iOS App...

Re: The Gates to Hell: Apple’s Notarizing

#189

Post by tinus_hn »

Applejinx wrote: post #120
galad87 wrote: post #13

I wrote a little sh script to notarize HandBrake two (or maybe three) years ago, and that's was it. It's not rocket science. But like every new thing, it required a bit of time to read the documentation and to understand what's going on. The plugin issue described in the article is probably related to the hardened runtime, so it's unrelated to the actual notarisation process.

I got all the Airwindows audio unit plugins notarized in about a week (that's several hundred distinct plugins), and used third party apps to do it (DropDMG and SD Notary) The trouble I ran into was this: Apple wants the process to be a little mystifying as a barrier to people trying to find exploits within it, I think. I disagree: for instance, using a shell script and the Apple terminal tools is very much the Apple…

Avoiding the type of malware that’s self encrypting and mutating to avoid detection seems like a significant goal. I don’t know if Gatekeeper achieves it though.

Re: The Gates to Hell: Apple’s Notarizing

#190

Post by anentropic »

saagarjha wrote: post #158
anentropic wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just tried an unsigned bin on M1 Big Sur and the experience is the same: it's initially blocked with a "Move to Trash" dialog but you can go to security prefs and click "allow anyway" Then try again, click "open" rather than "move to trash" on another warning dialog and the file does get run. I haven't tried a signed+un-notarized one but it sounds like it'd be similar?

I suspect that the code you're trying to run is ad-hoc signed.

Not by me... and it's my own code build from src in a github action.
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