Apple Extends Deadline for Sandboxing of Mac App Store Apps to June 1

[OneOkami]

People has been saying this since forever, and yet Apple keeps increasing in size. So at what size will we witness this proliferation of viruses?

The last I checked Apple's PC marketshare was about 15% domestically and about 5% worldwide. Growth percentages (which are often used in discussion of Apple's PC growth) can be misleading when you simply have a humongous room for growth at all.

Windows still claims the vast majority of the market and is thus still a far more attractive platform to target for malware. Even still, who's to say the amount of malware targeting Mac OS hasn't been increasing over time? And whether or not a proliferation of Mac OS viruses becomes a big enough issue for users to "witness" was not really my point. My point is simply as a system becomes more widespread in use, so will the attempts to use that system maliciously. People like to point the finger at Windows and say "eww viruses". Well excuse Windows for being widely used, it comes with the territory. Any OS in its position would be in the same scopes of malicious users.

And finally, the people of this forum never cease to amaze me (and I'm not talking directly to you here) in their justification of down-voting posts presenting reasonable logic and facts (referring to my post you quoted).

Stay classy MacRumors community.

 

[haravikk]

I'd like to point out again that it is currently possible to sandbox your app, but then apply exceptions to it, allowing for access to arbitrary files/folders and so-on. And as far as I can tell the Mac App Store should still accept such apps as being sandboxed.

The issue really is whether you're requesting entitlements that make no sense for your app, such as a chat program with access to the entire file-system. So long as the review process is being upgraded to include evaluation of the chosen entitlements and exceptions then I think it should all be okay.

Still, I expect developers will be firmly encouraged to use privilege separation anywhere they feel the need to use an exception, to limit damage or possibility for exploits. Apple does claim that they listen to bug reports filed regarding exceptions, so if you find you need access to certain areas that aren't normally allowed, then tell Apple!

Personally I'm hoping that exceptions will be expanded upon to become a runtime concept, allowing an app to request full file-system access from the user in an informative way. So that, for example, a virus-scanner could trigger a prompt such as "MyAwesomeVirusScanner requires read-only access to the entire file-system" with prompts to move virus-riddled files into quarantine.

The fact that the delays are being made is reassuring, and hopefully means that Apple is considering more capabilities and control for developers and users.

 

[Renzatic]

Probably one of the best articles I've seen on the sandbox and Gatekeeper. I heartily recommend everyone give it a read.

 

[haravikk]

That is a good article! I just want to add that what's important now is that developers and users alike make Apple aware of what we need from sandboxing.

It's important to remember that sandboxing is a very good thing for the security of any platform, the problem isn't that Apple wants to make sure that app store developers are using sandboxing, but instead that Apple's current sandboxing mechanism, while fine for iOS, is too restrictive for OS X. So we need to make sure that Apple is aware that we, as developers and users, need more entitlements and, where necessary, user dialogues so that the end user can see what exactly an app (or parts of an app) want to do, and either allow or deny that behaviour as appropriate.

My belief is that this should be handled by a greater set of entitlements, with a first-launch dialogue informing a user of what the app wishes access to, so they can decide if it sounds okay or not; i.e - it's fine for anti-virus to want full file-system access, but not a Facebook app! Likewise, apps should be able to request temporary entitlements, rather than requiring a privilege separation just to perform a quick operation that the rest of the app doesn't usually need to perform, or is only performed on demand rather than all the time. Again with a user dialogue to allow/deny/always allow that entitlement as required.

This would give developers an ideal mix of flexibility, and users the information they need in order to protect themselves. After all, we can't always defend users from themselves, the aim is to make sure they have a sane amount of clear information upon which to make decisions.

 

[DigitalFreedom]

Mac AppStore Jail

It's incredible to see from outside how far Americans got crazy with their security. Everybody knows that stricter security means less or no freedom, yet they are very very happy to go that way. I am shocked to see that happens in a country, where Freedom was a number one word and value for centuries.
Now Apple is turning into a Big Brother, who eventually wants to control and dictate everything in people's digital life and you are all applauding. Microsoft is going the same way in Windows 8, but it's just a bad copy of Apple.

Next step will be people saying "It's great to live in a Jail, because it's much more secure than a real world. There's somebody who cares about my safety".

Anyway, all about this Sandboxing and turning so great and open OS X into completely closed iOS-like entertainment crap - is all about developers, not users. Only some advanced users understand the real difference, but developers understand it much better. So I am glad there is still nothing from Google, Mozilla or Microsoft in AppStore and a couple of limited demos from Adobe. I really hope this AppStore will never become the only option..

Killing the choice and diversity is always a crime, but this way human civilisation is now going.
Coca cola killed almost all competitors around the world, so now we have that chemical junk in stores globally, eventually quality reduced dramatically, and you have almost no choice - but some are still happy anyway. Although I remember so great choice of beverages in Europe in 90ths. Not now. The world is crazy.

 

[axonic labs]

It's hard to balance between entitlement flexibility and annoying users with more complicated prompts etc. Some users (maybe majority) might not know what some entitlements mean and don't want to be bothered with it.

Sandbox might cover 90% of apps and the other 10% can use Gatekeeper. I really like Gatekeeper as both a user and a developer.