Signing Your Apps for Gatekeeper

https://developer.apple.com/developer-id/

by atarian • 8 years ago

211 128 8 years ago

developer.apple.com

bunnycorn• 8 years ago

Good, this doesn't even need for the software to be sent to Apple, only the hash.

jtbayly• 8 years ago

How can they scan your software and run security checks on it based only on a hash?

Are the checks actually run locally by xCode?

pgib• 8 years ago

Give users even more confidence in your software by submitting it to Apple to be notarized. The service automatically scans your Developer ID-signed software and performs security checks.

Looks like it uploads a bundle to them for all that to happen on their side.

orf• 8 years ago

They scan the software, not your software. If the hashed match against a known scanned good bit of software then it's safe. Maybe.

benatkin• 8 years ago

The software is sent to Apple when it is notarized. When a user downloads and runs it, it is not sent to Apple. It just uses the hash. It would be pretty crazy for Mac OS to send the whole package to Apple to do a security scan, but a naive reader might think that.

mariopt• 8 years ago

What does this mean for non open source projects? They need to submit the source code to ensure there is no malware, right? This is the standard practice in iOS apps.

lwansbrough• 8 years ago

iOS app binaries are submitted to the App Store, not the source code. Malware is detected via static analysis of the byte code (and presumably some runtime heuristic analysis) but it isn’t perfect.

scarface742• 8 years ago

For the most part, the main thing that I’m aware that static code analysis detects is using non public APIs. Most of the malware protection comes from IOS’s sandbox.

pducks32• 8 years ago

iOS does not involve sending your source code. This involves ensuring your app runs in their Hardened Runtime and is properly signed. Apple checks that there is no Malware.

djrogers• 8 years ago

This is the standard practice in iOS apps.

Pretty sure you’ve got your wires crossed here - you absolutely do not have to submit source code to put your app on the App Store.

sophiebits• 8 years ago

This protects against… making many slightly-different copies of a malware app and signing them all locally, so that revoking one doesn't affect the others?

IBM• 8 years ago

This lets Apple nuke a compromised version of an app without doing it to all versions or apps by that developer. Which would have been useful in the case of Transmission [1][2].

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/first...

[2] https://blog.malwarebytes.com/threat-analysis/2016/09/transm...

mrpippy• 8 years ago

Transmission’s Developer ID cert wasn’t compromised, the compromised binary was signed by a different developer.

jtokoph• 8 years ago

Note that in an upcoming release of macOS, Gatekeeper will require Developer ID signed software to be notarized by Apple.

Does this mean that anything distributed outside of the App Store will have to be approved by Apple? Will the App Store sandboxing rules apply to outside apps too?

notafraudster• 8 years ago

No, that's not what it means. Currently there are three security tiers for applications on macOS: App Store, not App Store but cryptographically signed, and not cryptographically signed. All three can be run.

That sentence means that in the future, the second category (applications which are not on the App Store but are cryptographically signed) will need you to generate a certificate with Apple. Nothing about the app store's sandboxing rules, and nothing about all applications -- you can run unsigned applications to your heart's content.

api• 8 years ago

It's another slow gradual step toward total lockdown.

I feel like eventually I'll have to abandon Mac, but for what? Linux is still flaky and Windows adware unless you spring for Enterprise.

I would pay for a commercial Linux as polished as MacOS, but there may not be enough of me. (It could also have a list of officially supported hardware to at least approach the stability benefits of Apple's vertically integrated HW/SW stack.)

pushedx• 8 years ago

How do you run unsigned code on iOS. e.g. How can I build an XCode project and have it run on my iPhone?

seltzered_• 8 years ago

Weren't most developers already generating a certificate with Apple for the second category? I was paying apple 99/yr when I was actively developing a non-app-store app largely just so I could get the app signed with my developer id. I tried reading into alternatives it seemed like a risky process. Ideally I'd like to pay a bit less if I'm not using the benefits of app-review, but the notarization process seems like a decent compromise.

Even on windows my experience is that signed-non-windows-store apps can get flagged as malicious upon download if they're fairly niche/aren't used by many people, supposedly using an EV Cert helps with that. The user experience is actually worse from my experience (windows will show something red, then you have to click some non-obvious buttons to successfully run the app).

cm21873• 8 years ago

It is still a writing on the wall. It makes no sense to tighten the security on signed apps if it is not to prevent unsigned app from running at one point. Which is clearly the direction of travel (and what Microsoft also did with WinRT and Windows 10 S). I don't have to wait until the final destination to not like the direction.

comex2• 8 years ago

Notarized, not approved. It's not a manual process, doesn't involve App Store-like approval rules, and doesn't require sandboxing.

woolvalley2• 8 years ago

But in the future, it could, as apple boils the frog bit by bit.

thefounder9• 8 years ago

It's pretty much the same(notarized/approved). The only difference is that Apple may not "reject" the app before you publish it, but once it decides to "ban" it you can no longer sign it as they suspend your developer account. I can think of uTorrent as a possible victim of this "notarization" process. Apple can quickly put peer to peer file sharing apps on the "malicious/banned" list just like they did on Appstore.

morpheuskafka3• 8 years ago

No. Users can still disable Gatekeeper for complete control, just as they can disable Secure Boot on PCs, and just as they can disable Google Play Protect and enable "unknown sources" on Android.

josteink3• 8 years ago

Nitpick: Secure boot is about the firmware protecting the machine at boot time against unauthorized OSes or OS-modifications, establishing trust in the boot-media.

App-signing is about protecting the user within an already booted OS, trusted or not.

These are very different concepts.

gergles• 8 years ago

So this is another step for Apple to try to get everyone paying them their software development tax, since "notarization" requires you paying the $100 annual fee.

While you currently can still run digitally signed software that is not notarized, this document admits that in the future signed software will require Apple's approval, so Apple will make everyone's software LESS secure (by forcing developers to not sign the code if they aren't paying Apple) so that it will continue running.

Sigh.

seandougall• 8 years ago

As others have pointed out, you already have to pay the tax to get a trusted signing certificate. So as far as the economics go, this isn’t a change.

thefounder9• 8 years ago

It's actually a big change. One issue is that Apple may not approve you(for whatever reason) or keep you on the waitlist for weeks(happened to me). Not to mention that there won't be any competition. Next would be to make Safari and any browser running on osx accept only Apple tls certificates. That would be "awesome"! Finally Apple "secures" the internet

ronreiter• 8 years ago

Your post is full of assumptions.

First of all, $100 per year merely covers the costs for this service.

Apple will never force apps to always be notarized, although they might enable admins to enable such a feature for security purposes which I think is great.

SyneRyder• 8 years ago

Apple will never force apps to always be notarized...

Apple's website actually says that they will:

"Note that in an upcoming release of macOS, Gatekeeper will require Developer ID signed software to be notarized by Apple."

microtonal• 8 years ago

So this is another step for Apple to try to get everyone paying them their software development tax, since "notarization" requires you paying the $100 annual fee.

I don't think Apple really cares about the fee. I know that the three platforms are now bundled together under one developer program, but suppose that there are 100,000 Mac developers that publish signed or App Store applications (which is probably an overestimation), the fees will make Apple 10 million. This is less than pocket change to them.

To me it seems that the $100 annual fee is to prevent fraud: (1) using a credit card to tie the developer account to an actual person; (2) make it expensive enough to avoid playing whack-a-mole with malicious account creation.

camillomiller2• 8 years ago

Indeed. Plus don't underestimate the psychological barrier that value can provide. 100$ are a sweet spot: it keeps everyone and their dog from signing up just because ("it's free, I might give it a go"), but at the same time it's not too much for a motivated developer who wants to dabble into programming for the Apple ecosystem of devices.

pakitan• 8 years ago

Isn't all this achieved with a generic code signing certificate? What additional benefit does Apple's "notarization" offer, other than further fragmenting the market?

cm21873• 8 years ago

And making it expensive enough to turn down hobbyists or teenagers. I don’t think I agree with this approach.

pjmlp3• 8 years ago

$100 is nothing compared with game consoles fees, or enterprise software licenses.

kzrdude• 8 years ago

Hopefully Apple's platform continues to be a general purpose computing platform and not a console.

csomar• 8 years ago

I don't think Apple is making any significant money out of these $100 subscriptions. The payment fee is the best SPAM detector out there.

foobarbazetc2• 8 years ago

Did anyone figure out how to just get a DMG or whatever created outside Xcode notarized? These docs are too Xcode focused.

varenc• 8 years ago

The docs say you can use ‘xcrun altool’ to get a dmg/zip/pkg notarized. That’s an XCode tool but no indication that what you’re submitting needs to be created in XCode.

saagarjha5• 8 years ago

Xcode doesn't do anything special to your binary; you should be able to submit a valid codesigned application bundle AFAIK.

xenadu02• 8 years ago

xcrun just locates tools inside the current $DEVELOPER_DIR, which is inside the Xcode.app bundle (based on which Xcode is selected with xcode-select). You can think of xcode-select as virtualenv or similar systems: you select which version of the tools you want to use.

Fun fact: If you symlink xcrun as a different name, it will assume that is the name of the tool you wish to run. So "ln -s /usr/bin/xcrun altool" will make altool an alias to run the version of altool bundled with the currently selected Xcode.

thefounder9• 8 years ago

So if Apple won't like my app it won't renew my developer account so that I cannot sign it anymore. Seems quite "fair" and I sense no lock-down or censorship. Let's be happy for making the internet "safer". As some have said this is good news for ...(fill the gap)

klodolph2• 8 years ago

Are you talking about the old policy, or what? The only thing that has changed here is the process for signing an app, which has always required a developer account. It just requires uploading a binary now, instead of working entirely offline. And you can still run unsigned apps.

thefounder9• 8 years ago

You didn't need a Apple developer account to sign the app if you used a 3rd party(i.e digicert) certificate/signer.

GeekyBear• 8 years ago

A pretty good blog summary of how this differs from past practice.

https://eclecticlight.co/2018/09/24/has-that-app-been-notari...

TLDR: You have to adopt the new OS user privacy protections. (Users must give permission for your app to access things like the webcam, microphone, contacts, photos, location data, etc.)

Your app gets scanned for malware before it is signed.

There is still no App Store approval process involved.

saagarjha5• 8 years ago

You have to adopt the new OS user privacy protections.

Don't you have to do this anyways?

makecheck• 8 years ago

On the one hand, of all the big companies, Apple seems closest to “getting it” with respect to security.

On the other hand, NO entity is inherently trustworthy “forever”, nor should any entity have the power to be a unilateral Decider even on its own platform. Just like when a good restaurant may some day become bad under new management, we are just one “new management” away from Apple becoming something that maybe we don’t trust so much. This system is being set up to give “Apple” tremendous power for “all future definitions of Apple”, which is ridiculous. That wouldn’t make sense even if Apple were a perfect saint today, invulnerable to buggy software and disgruntled employees and other potential weaknesses.

We need a system whereby users decide which SET of entities they trust, one of which may include Apple, and which may even exclude Apple if the user so chooses. The complex mechanism for signing and verifying things should be open-source so it can be understood and validated and reproduced cross-platform. Then you decide who you trust, period. You can rely on others to help you determine what is trustworthy. Given this type of system, I would be fine with macOS saying “select at least one trusted source to enable software installations”, knowing that I ultimately decide what those authorities will be. I am not fine with their seeming “father knows best” approach.

Arqu2• 8 years ago

That works for "us" HN geeks. The consumer market is all about convenience, and the monent the custoners have to go through some hoops a new company will pop up that will do it as a service which they then trust for doing it properly. And while I'm all for decentralizing power, I'd rather have 1 accountable company or a couple of them handle this compared to a bunch of small independent ones consodering they are less auditable and more open to skewing the system. Maybe something like the W3 consortium but we know how that turned out...

darawk• 8 years ago

True, but there need not be a convenience tradeoff. Make Apple the default signing authority, but make it configurable by the user. Normal users need not ever see it, but they retain an opt out if it ever becomes necessary.

tobias3• 8 years ago

Microsoft does this with drivers since Windows 10 (attestation singing). I think this is okay, since users hold Microsoft responsible if the kernel crashes and this at least gives them the possibility to investigate.

Signing apps with normal (EV) code signing certificates is the best we have for other apps, I think. If you detect malware signed by a a certificate you blacklist that one and foward information to the relevant criminal authorities. If they don't investigate you blacklist the whole country. That last step is probably the most controversial one, but otherwise you still have a malware problem.

Tsubasachan2• 8 years ago

Sure but you CAN install unsigned drivers if you want.

Windows is pretty open about this, Apple is a walled garden. Safe but boring.

ChrisSD3• 8 years ago

To paraphrase an infamous quote: Apple have root.

What good is any signing if you can't trust the OS? There are a myriad of ways they could undermine the verification.

SXX• 8 years ago

I'm not Apple fanboy in any way, but how exactly trusting Apple to hold root access to your system is any worse than trusting to baseband in any other smartphone? It's just whole chain of trust so fundamentally broken so there no way you can trust to any device and Apple at least not any worse here.

In literally every phone baseband is not isolated, run it's own OS and can do anything to OS even if you have root. On top of that every ARM SOC have TrustZone that supposedly might also run any code and you have zero control over it.

JohnStrangeII• 8 years ago

Your position is based on an (implicit) false dilemma.

It's perfectly possible to "trust" Apple in the sense that you use their operating system and hardware after you've bought it. This kind of "trust" is similar to "agreeing with an EULA or TOS". There is not much of an alternative to it.

This does not imply that you therefore must also trust Apple as the one and only broker and manager of certificates for software running on your machine. You could, for example, suspect that Apple might revoke a certificate for some developer that creates a controversial product (e.g. a p2p client) or some product that competes with Apple products or some future plans of features. For example, Apple has in the past essentially copied innovative apps and revoked licences for the app store of the original developers. In theory, Apple could just erase such applications, since they "have root". In practice, they wouldn't do so. But they would and will revoke certificates and app store licences.

The new rules also make alternative app stores impossible, of course, although I'm not sure they were possible before.

In a nutshell, trust != trust. You can trust a hardware or software maker in some respects but not in others.

The primary goal of Gatekeeper is monopolization of secure access, not security.

specialist• 8 years ago

Agree. I humbly suggest that you add "revokable trust" to your "opt-in trust" thesis.

tmymt• 8 years ago

What's the difference between this and Authenticode?

abcd_f• 8 years ago

Today it may be optionally notarized.

Tomorrow it must be notarized.

Then it won't be notarized if it uses "dangerous" APIs.

Then it won't be notarized unless it's distributed through the AppStore.

You can't force every vendor into the AppStore, but you can gradually train users to distrust everything that's not in it. What we are seeing here is just an Act 1 of that.

gamegod• 8 years ago

Remember that time Apple messed up and decided to punish all their app developers by forcing them to resign their apps?

garganzol• 8 years ago

So, basically this a replay of Orwellian "1984" where the tables have turned. Now Apple is the Big Brother and it is there to dictate. Who is going to throw that hammer nowadays?

rgovostes• 8 years ago

I was recently cleaning off someone's Mac and made this note:

I found no fewer than eight fake Adobe Flash updaters, six of them identical and signed by Nevaeh Mitchell (WMAA75SZMS), one signed by Lambert Jeremy (B4MCPEJ42J), and one by Wolfe Bailey (3W8NF7PWUL). It does not appear that Apple has revoked any of these signing certificates or flagged any of these installers through macOS's built-in malware removal tools.

So it doesn't seem to me that malware authors are exactly afraid of signing requirements.

Signing Your Apps for Gatekeeper

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