"As a developer I don’t trust developers with the right to run arbitrary code on their users’ devices without restriction," he said. If Apple required all macOS apps to be signed, he said, it would make Mac developers very angry, but he'd be okay with it. Simeon Saëns, co-founder of development biz Two Lives Left, told The Register, he had no specific knowledge of a plan to require signing for macOS apps and wondered whether the rumor might just be about notarized apps, which wouldn't be a big deal. Level up Mac security, and say game over to malware? System alerts plus Apple game engine equals antivirus package READ MORE Potential problems, he said, would be that unsigned legacy software might not run and any open source software currently distributed without being signed would have to pay the annual fee for an Apple developer account, take on the legal responsibility for signed code and deal with the secure maintenance of private keys. "Special code signatures that are only available to Apple often effectively save Apple from their own dog food – and it shows," he said. Schwarz said he believes one of the reasons these cumbersome changes have proliferated is that Apple has different requirements for its own apps and for those of third-party developers. "I fear, however, that it could be a continuation of the kind of platform security changes macOS has seen in more recent history: well intentioned, but not well made." "If Apple wants to really require signing for all apps with 10.15, I really hope that Apple has thought about these issues and put viable, working solutions for them in place," he said. And given that Apple is working on a common framework (Marzipan) to make it easier to write iOS apps that work on macOS (and vice versa), there's a certain logic to harmonizing security policies across Apple's desktop and mobile platforms.Īsked about the possibility that Apple might require code signing for all macOS apps, Felix Schwarz, who runs iOS and macOS app biz IOSPIRIT, said he hadn't heard that and suggested it would be a "bittersweet solution" if true. Getting rid of this mechanism would make macOS more like iOS, where all apps must be signed. But it clearly wants to discourage reliance on unsigned apps due to the potential security and privacy risks. With macOS Sierra, Apple began hiding the option to install apps from unidentified developers.Ĭurrently, the company provides a way to whitelist unidentified apps in Gatekeeper by control-clicking on the app in Finder, selecting the Open menu and then authenticating with your username and password. Plus, on the Mac, all the security can be turned off anyway," he said.Īt the same time, the distance between what Apple has said it will do with mandatory notarization and what it could do by closing Gatekeeper to any unsigned code is small. "Seems at odds with how Apple is positioning the Mac right now as a workstation for professionals they already have a consumer OS that goes to those lengths, iOS. Steve Troughton-Smith, who develops apps for High Caffeine Content, expressed skepticism that Apple would go so far as to ban unsigned code entirely. When we asked Cabel Sasser, co-founder of macOS and iOS app biz Panic, about this, he suggested as much. We suspect that those whispering the supposed looming changes have mistaken the foretold notarization requirement with a slightly broader restriction affecting not just developer-signed apps but all apps. Basically, a green light to macOS to smoothly install the software seeing as it's been screened by Apple and determined to be safe.Īpple has said app notarization is optional under Mojave but will be mandatory in the future: "Note that in an upcoming release of macOS, Gatekeeper will require Developer ID signed software to be notarized by Apple," the company explains on its developer website. Successfully vetted apps get appended with a ticket that provides extra information to Gatekeeper, for more streamlined installation prompt and signing key audits. The Mojave update introduced the concept of app notarization, a pre-distribution code-scanning service performed by Apple that looks for malicious content and signing problems in developer-signed apps. But it's refusal to do so makes the claim at least worth discussing, given that it's not very far from changes delivered in macOS Mojave (10.14). The last time this reporter got an immediate, unequivocal response from Apple was in 2006 when, after asking about the health of then CEO Steve Jobs (visibly frail at the time and two years after Jobs disclosed his cancer diagnosis), the company's comms chief herself sent an email insisting, "Steve’s health is robust and we have no idea where these rumors are coming from."Īpple, of course, has no obligation to its customers, developers or the general public to address speculation.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |