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macOS has checked app signatures online for over 2 years

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Re: macOS has checked app signatures online for over 2 years

#271

Post by moduspol »

athms wrote: post #227
xalava wrote: post #25

Interesting, but reading the conclusion I'm fascinated in this affaire how technically knowledgeable people loose common sense to defend their favorite brand: - Per launch verification is terrible for privacy, vis-a-vis Apple and the whole network when it happens in plain text - "They should also explain how, having enjoyed their benefits for a couple of years, they’ve suddenly decided they were such a bad idea after…

>I'm fascinated in this affaire how technically knowledgeable people loose common sense to defend their favorite brand...when it happens in plain text I'm fascinated how technically knowledgeable people don't understand OCSP. Checking the revocation status of certificates is why OCSP was created. It happens via HTTP. Why? Because you cannot check a certificate used for the HTTPS connection when you are using HTTPS fo…

It's also easy to imagine what the blog posts would look like if they did the same thing except over TLS--in a way that the harmlessness / purpose of the request was not immediately apparent.

I agree with you, though--it seems like they solved a valid problem with the most obvious, commonly-used solution. The real debate is probably just over whether or not the problem is a sufficiently large threat to justify the downsides.

Re: macOS has checked app signatures online for over 2 years

#272

Post by dcow »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #246
dcow wrote: post #231

Security and privacy are not parallel concerns, they’re orthogonal. Strong security absolutely does not imply utmost privacy. I find this to be the most dangerous misconception of the late privacy trend. You can’t just turn security and privacy dials to 11. They’re actually two ends of the same dial, or opposing poles of the same sphere. To increase privacy you must move away from perfect security. Why? Because secur…

While security and privacy are not parallel, they are not orthogonal either. You can have both. Integrity checks can be done anonymously (e.g.: you could have a p2p network of devices sharing a signed database of certificate revocations). Encrypting something gives me privacy. Signing something gives me security. Encrypting a signed package gives me both.

They _are_ orthogonal, you’re just saying that you can have some of both which is exactly my my point about them existing on a spectrum.

And it’s not as simple as encrypting data. You have to trust somebody to determine what good integrity looks like and to then verify the integrity information is fresh. The same privacy concern exists if you run OCSP against cypher-text as it does plaintext. You still have a stream of all the things people do. Bad for privacy.

Running a decentralized system means you have to trust all the nodes to not to store data or collude. Same problem in a different way. You simply cannot achieve integrity verification if you don't trust anyone to do it. And this is why they are orthogonal. Trust is not compatible with doubt.

The issue here is that Apple took off the shelf OCSP and applied it in a way it was not designed for. So there _are_ actual problems with their late implementation. They should be fixed. And personally I think OCSP is kinda dumb because it mechanically defeats the advantage of certs (you don’t need a cert if you’re going to phone home for every invocation, just check a hash), but meh.

Re: macOS has checked app signatures online for over 2 years

#273

Post by lwouis »

nickpp wrote: post #185
shawnz wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The technical issue is "can we provide these features without weakening privacy?" The political issue is "if we can't provide these features without weakening privacy, should we still provide them?" Aren't they both important points to discuss?

They are, but the difference is that we can fix technical issues, or at least improve them. We can (mostly) agree about what's right and wrong and what's better or worse. Political issues on the other hand, just end up antagonizing us ever more. We argue endlessly, go on countless tangents and nobody agrees on anything because we see the very issues under different lights, experiences, values and cultures. I am tired…

Politics is about where we go. Tech is about how we arrive there. If you disagree on the direction we are headed, discussing different ways to arrive there seems pointless.

You may agree with the status-quo politics, but other people don't. For them it's not about the tech, it's about the overall direction. For those people the important discussion to have is political.

For instance, I personally am against the current direction macOS and Windows are headed. I have no problem with these kind of security measures as long as there is a button to opt out. Currently, Apple decides for everyone, and doesn't provide ways to opt out for power users. I dislike this, and I feel like discussing better cryptography, security protocols, etc, doesn't address my priorities.

Re: macOS has checked app signatures online for over 2 years

#274

Post by valuearb »

oblio wrote: post #213
valuearb wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes because there are never unwanted side effects from more laws.

That's human nature. As soon as something beneficial to few and detrimental to others is banned, those who benefit seek to find other ways to continue benefitting, again to the detriment of others. This doesn't mean we shouldn't continue trying to stop them. And we stop them through laws. Common sense is not that common and human decency doesn't scale.

In the US, the typical citizen commits an average of a felony a day. The legal code and associated regulations are so lengthy no one can read all of them. The tax code alone is 2,600 pages and associated rulings 70,000 pages.

When you have so many laws, they can be applied selectively depending on your political status, or to benefit the regulators or their friends. We just caught the sheriff of Santa Clara extorting citizens for tens of thousands of dollars to get concealed carry permits, which is why many people carry illegally, just like criminals.

Creating a law where non-disclosure of the smallest feature opens you up to government regulators harassment is another avenue for graft and corruption. Like when the EU selectively prosecutes US companies, or US regulators selectively harass companies not in lock step with the current administration.

I think if you really need a nanny state to protect you from your own decisions you should be required to give up all your decisions to the state.

Re: macOS has checked app signatures online for over 2 years

#275

Post by Sigmoid »

zepto wrote: post #128
_qulr wrote: post #58

I give up on Hacker News. Go ahead and wallow in your ignorance, downvoting experts.

It has been widely known that these checks were happening. Not only that, this isn’t the first server problem that impacted launch performance. It’s just the most severe. The main difference is that this time around there are people who are claiming that Apple is using the OCSP checks for some kind of nefarious tracking purposes. These people have no evidence.

"The main difference is that this time around there are people who are claiming that Apple is using the OCSP checks for some kind of nefarious tracking purposes."

What proof is there that we should trust Apple? They could tracking for nefarious purposes for all you know. Thats the problem.

Re: macOS has checked app signatures online for over 2 years

#276

Post by kstrauser »

Someone1234 wrote: post #235
bitL wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't Apple download all footprints of bad apps locally instead of monitoring every single invocation of apps? Is second execution of an app the same security risk as the first one? That's the design flaw.

You mean bad certificates rather than applications. OCSP can be locally cached, and Apple's implementation does exactly that. But eventually you'll have to refresh the cache and then the implementation needs to be fault tolerant (Apple's wasn't). OCSP leaks what vendors your installed applications are from. The list of leaked certificates changes daily, so any good implementation is going to check again at least seve…

I wonder how hard it'd be to serve this data via DNS, like "dig -t TXT 0xdeadbeef.ocsp.apple.com". Then you get a nice, distributed architecture with lots of built-in cache handling, and since the data is currently served via HTTP, it wouldn't expose any more data to your ISP than already is today. It would also mean that if you have 100 people in the office and a local DNS cache, then each OCSP query would be made exactly once and then its answer shared among everyone else in the office.

Re: macOS has checked app signatures online for over 2 years

#277

Post by pydry »

Someone1234 wrote: post #235
bitL wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't Apple download all footprints of bad apps locally instead of monitoring every single invocation of apps? Is second execution of an app the same security risk as the first one? That's the design flaw.

You mean bad certificates rather than applications. OCSP can be locally cached, and Apple's implementation does exactly that. But eventually you'll have to refresh the cache and then the implementation needs to be fault tolerant (Apple's wasn't). OCSP leaks what vendors your installed applications are from. The list of leaked certificates changes daily, so any good implementation is going to check again at least seve…

Differential downloads are a solved problem : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/update/p...

Re: macOS has checked app signatures online for over 2 years

#278

Post by cma »

dkonofalski wrote: post #245
wintermutestwin wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but this shouldn't be necessary in response to anti-consumer behavior.

This is not anti-consumer behavior. Consumers are, overall, protected when they can verify the source of an application or extension on their computers. Their freedom may be limited but it's not a black-and-white "this is anti-consumer".

Some signatures are invalidated due to business disputes on entirely different platforms (Epic dispute on iOS, signatures invalidated, or threatened to be before court order prevented it, on OS X, for no security reason).

Re: macOS has checked app signatures online for over 2 years

#279

Post by pseudalopex »

athms wrote: post #267
throwaway525142 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I understand it, most vendors ship a single digit amount of apps. If you start the Tor browser, everyone on your network will know. If you start Firefox, everyone on your network will know you started a Mozilla product, most likely Firefox. If you start the Zoom client, everyone on your network knows you started the Zoom client. I don't think the "it's only the vendor" defense of Apple is any good.

On MacOS, developer certificate requests are NOT done for every application launch. Responses are cached for a period of time before a new check is done. FYI -- Both Firefox and Safari use OCSP to check server certificates. Anybody sniffing your network could figure out which websites you visit. Chrome still uses CRL; it trades precision for performance.

That period of time was 5 minutes.

Re: macOS has checked app signatures online for over 2 years

#280

Post by [deleted] »

xalava wrote: post #25

Interesting, but reading the conclusion I'm fascinated in this affaire how technically knowledgeable people loose common sense to defend their favorite brand: - Per launch verification is terrible for privacy, vis-a-vis Apple and the whole network when it happens in plain text - "They should also explain how, having enjoyed their benefits for a couple of years, they’ve suddenly decided they were such a bad idea after…

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