I'm probably stating the obvious, but I think it's always worth keeping in mind that these software verification systems, both on Windows and now MacOS, are not for us.
Ten years ago, I was constantly getting laptops dropped off at my house from friends and family who'd picked up some virus and needed a clean install. That doesn't happen anymore, and it's not because they're no longer using laptops - they are.
It's thanks to these security systems. And yes, there are privacy implications. But for most people, you'd have to compare those to the privacy implications of having some virus sweeping your hard drive.
If you're the sort of person who reads Hacker News you can probably spot a fake program or dodgy link in e-mail a mile off. But if you're not interested enough to care enough to know the difference, there's no free lunch on the privacy issue.
I couldn’t agree more. I don’t know if people have a short memory, or if I just grew up in a particularly malware-infested part of meatspace, but in the late 90s and early 2000s doing extensive malware/virus scans on PCs was an entire industry and career path.
I agree and actually are happy about security facilities on my computer. The question is, whether the way Apple implemented this is the right way. Except for launching a program the very first time on a computer, the security check shouldn't block program execution. The check should run asynchronously. Especially, as it seems to be fine to start any program, when your computer is off the network.
Also, the system could be reacting better detecting that the Apple server is unresponsive. If a certain number of requests didn't answer in a timeout of a few seconds, it should not lock up but treat the server as not reachable.
could these be done on-device, esp since they built in all that Secure Enclave crytographic stuff, vs in the cloud? At least partially?
I mean having it phone home to the authentication server every time seems laborious vs. say, downloading a set of definitions every night that gets checked against some hash in the Secure Enclave or something.
You don't really need the secure enclave for this since it's the kernel doing the enforcement. I'm sure Apple considered syncing, since it's hard to implement something and not even glance at the other solutions on the market. My guess is
* They expect the database to be too large to practically fit on every device. If this is really going to be literally every program or script ever run on macOS then that's gonna be huge.
* They don't want to deal with "virus definitions out of date" issues or "please update your AV" in response to an incident.
* They want to be able to revoke a malicious program immediately and not worry about cache expirations which is why the cache is only used when it's really really offline.
Ten years ago, I was constantly getting laptops dropped off at my house from friends and family who'd picked up some virus and needed a clean install. That doesn't happen anymore, and it's not because they're no longer using laptops - they are.
It's thanks to these security systems. And yes, there are privacy implications. But for most people, you'd have to compare those to the privacy implications of having some virus sweeping your hard drive.
If you're the sort of person who reads Hacker News you can probably spot a fake program or dodgy link in e-mail a mile off. But if you're not interested enough to care enough to know the difference, there's no free lunch on the privacy issue.