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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

#371

Post by kelnos »

_jal wrote: post #228
ethbr0 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The act of breaching privacy is technically difficult to prohibit in a way many of us would find palatable. What should be targeted is the product of said breaches. Something like the blood diamond approach. If your company has PII, then you by law must be able to produce a consented attestation chain all the way back to the source. If you do not, then you're charged a fine for every piece of unattested PII on every…

- Can you demonstrate the provenance of every phone number, email address and other contact mode on your phone? Note people's birthdays? Sure, you only want to target companies. Make sure you choose your acquaintances wisely, I guess, or make sure you record their grant of permission to email them, because people abuse laws like this to harass each other every single day. - This also punishes possession, not use. If…

> This also punishes possession, not use.

If companies were immune to data breaches or leaks, then maybe this wouldn't be such a big deal. But I don't trust most companies to securely hold my data, even if they don't use it at all.

And besides, by the time a company uses the data in a privacy-destroying way, it's too late. The cat is out of the bag. Sure, the law against use could serve as a deterrent, but companies will push the law past the breaking point all the time. If you make possession trigger legal action, you can mop these things up before they get to use your data. Sure, you still have the problem of finding out about that possession. But also consider that if you have laws against possession and "bad" use, and a company does something, you can charge them for both things and hurt them more. That's a larger deterrent.

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

#372

Post by kelnos »

valuearb wrote: post #138
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lying to the customer about what your product does, or having secret functionality, should be a criminal offence in the same way as breaking and entering or stalking are. Then, we would find out very quickly what people value. I firmly believe this ecosystem (as in privacy violating ad and data selling business model) is only dominant because companies are able to mislead with impunity, so it's basically a form of fr…

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

Sure, but that's not an argument to give up.

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

#373

Post by marksomnian »

als0 wrote: post #247
epistasis wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The black list of malware is called Xprotect and dates back to 2009. This check for revoked certificates is a different security layer. The second check of an app is necessary to check for revocation: for a developer that decides that they've been compromised and wants to stop execution of their software. The alternative would be to use certificate revocation lists instead of OCSP. CRL lists can get long, so OCSP is…

I've been wondering why CRL couldn't be used if the OCSP goes down or no reply is received. That way you get the benefits of both. Any reason why this would be a bad idea? Also are CRLs really that bad in practice? I know it would be a bad idea on a smartphone but is it really an issue on a laptop?

The other main issue is bandwidth. For a CRL, Apple has to serve the full list of revoked serial numbers (or some shard of it), even if 90% of users don’t have 90% of the revoked apps installed. I can’t remember where I read this, but I recall that after the Heartbleed disclosure one CA saw their CRL traffic grow by some number in the gigabits per second. Bandwidth is relatively cheap, but still not free (without even considering the argument of “do I need to know that the cert for an app that I will never use is revoked?”).

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

#374

Post by kelnos »

absolutelyrad wrote: post #20
nullc wrote: post #2

A common refrain in arguments that we don't need laws to protect privacy is that the market will take care of it. The market can't act against what it can't see. Privacy loss is often irreversible. A common refrain in arguments that we don't need to reject closed source software to protect privacy is that being closed source doesn't hide the behaviour, and people will still notice backdoors and privacy leaks. Sometim…

The market only acts fairly when the product is a commodity. The time for the market to react for a product with the complexity of a mac is decades. As the ecosystem grows, the cost of switching increases. Therefore market starts acting more and more inefficiently. This is why countries have state intervention in such cases. And anti trust exists. If the option was a mac with privacy vs a mac without privacy but $10…

> If the option was a mac with privacy vs a mac without privacy but $10 cheaper, I'd think the market would pick the mac with privacy.

I'm curious about this, and there are some ways we could test it if we had access to sales data.

Amazon sells a Kindle that displays ads on the screen while the device is asleep, and a more expensive model without ads. How many people buy the one without ads? (I'm assuming the device sends back a record as to what ads were seen or interacted with, which has privacy implications.)

Hulu has a plan that shows adverts when you watch a show, and a more expensive plan that doesn't. How many people pay for the more expensive plan?

More generally, what's the price spread that would cause most people to flip from buying one version or the other? To use your example, I'm sure most people would pay for a "mac with privacy" if the difference (on a multi-hundred-dollar or $1k+ product) was only $10. But what if the difference was $50? $100?

And that's not even the exact same example, since a "mac with privacy" might look, to the average user, to be identical in operation to the "mac without privacy". Paying more to avoid advertisements has a clear impact on the experience of using a device/service. But knowing that your $X-more-expensive mac isn't sending application launch data to Apple doesn't change your day-to-day experience much.

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

#375

Post by kelnos »

aftbit wrote: post #318
Someone1234 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 doubt the full list of hashes of all revoked certs is 100s of MB, and even if it is, the daily update file surely isn't that big.

Right, and given that those certificates expire after some finite amount of time, this wouldn't be a forever-growing CRL, as expired certs could be dropped from the file periodically.

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

#376

Post by Supermancho »

absolutelyrad wrote: post #20
nullc wrote: post #2

A common refrain in arguments that we don't need laws to protect privacy is that the market will take care of it. The market can't act against what it can't see. Privacy loss is often irreversible. A common refrain in arguments that we don't need to reject closed source software to protect privacy is that being closed source doesn't hide the behaviour, and people will still notice backdoors and privacy leaks. Sometim…

The market only acts fairly when the product is a commodity. The time for the market to react for a product with the complexity of a mac is decades. As the ecosystem grows, the cost of switching increases. Therefore market starts acting more and more inefficiently. This is why countries have state intervention in such cases. And anti trust exists. If the option was a mac with privacy vs a mac without privacy but $10…

> I'd think the market would pick the mac with privacy.

What "privacy" means here is a huge issue. I would not agree that this would be the case. I think you'll find the majority looking to save 10$, which is almost nothing for many people but a non-trivial amount for most in the US.

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

#378

Post by Sigmoid »

zepto wrote: post #326
Sigmoid wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can always justify a conspiracy theory on the basis that you can’t prove a negative like this. Its not about definitively claiming they are being nefarious, its about they CAN be, and Apple isn't transparent enough for us to know if they're not. So its about risk. People can use Apple products, I don't really care, but they risk their privacy when they do, and thats not a risk people should have to take when us…

Any software vendor CAN be nefarious. It is just innuendo to claim it about a particular one without evidence. People don’t risk their privacy by trusting Apple any more than they do by trusting anyone else. Almost certainly less so than by trusting a company that makes money out of personal information. Singling Apple out without evidence is misleading innuendo. If we want people to have the option not to trust priv…

> Any software vendor CAN be nefarious.

I'm glad you finally realized this! And thats why people should use FOSS.

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

#379

Post by kelnos »

JackC wrote: post #243
flemhans wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many revocations do they do? How about just downloading the whole list to the clients which they can check offline.

It sounds like that's how it used to work, and then it changed for some reason, maybe to do with the size of the list and a need for faster updates. Actually that unknown exposes the problem with the original article's demand that critics explain what they want to replace Apple's system. No one outside of Apple is in a position to design a system that addresses all of the design constraints -- we don't even know what…

> It sounds like that's how it used to work, and then it changed for some reason, maybe to do with the size of the list and a need for faster updates.

If that's true, that's a lazy excuse on Apple's part. Differential updates has been a solved problem for many, many years. Hourly or even daily diffs would be tiny (likely much less traffic than the OCSP checks that occur now), and expired certs could be dropped from the local store, so it wouldn't grow without bound. (Sure, ok, people could turn their clocks back and defeat that last bit, but doing that would break other things, too, like TLS to any website with a reasonably recent cert.)

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

#380

Post by angry_octet »

kelnos wrote: post #374
absolutelyrad wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market only acts fairly when the product is a commodity. The time for the market to react for a product with the complexity of a mac is decades. As the ecosystem grows, the cost of switching increases. Therefore market starts acting more and more inefficiently. This is why countries have state intervention in such cases. And anti trust exists. If the option was a mac with privacy vs a mac without privacy but $10…

> If the option was a mac with privacy vs a mac without privacy but $10 cheaper, I'd think the market would pick the mac with privacy. I'm curious about this, and there are some ways we could test it if we had access to sales data. Amazon sells a Kindle that displays ads on the screen while the device is asleep, and a more expensive model without ads. How many people buy the one without ads? (I'm assuming the device…

Apple buyers are in the premium price segment. Kindle Fire or whatever is for the most price sensitive segment.

Companies pay lots of money per user to secure their computer work. They could save lots of licencing by running obsolete software. Companies that do that are hacked, and sometimes mortally wounded. I'm not so sure users price privacy so cheaply.

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