Fun with macOS's Sip

https://metalbear.co/blog/fun-with-macoss-sip/

by signa11 • 3 years ago

88 42 3 years ago

cobbal• 3 years ago

There are few miseries I deal with regularly that compare to SIP or the hardened runtime telling me I may not debug processes on a computer where I have root. If anything is going to make me abandon macOS (I've been using it since I was a child) it's the "security and privacy" features.

aviramha6• 3 years ago

I totally feel you though I can understand that for Apple the average consumer's security > hackers :) I think Apple should remember that people debugging and working is important too, and make the documentation around the security features less obscure. (Attaching a debugger/ptrace on macOS is really evil to implement)

sbuk2• 3 years ago

The security and privacy features benefit the majority, of which you clearly are not, so there is an escape hatch for you; turn off SIP. Just don't disable it for typical users.

justsomeadvice0• 3 years ago

Yea, I'm really not sure how this is a "misery". System processes are protected for typical users to limit the blast radius of malware, among other reasons. If you are capable of debugging system processes you should be able to manage to:

Restart macOS, holding ⌘+R. Open Terminal. Type `csrutil disable`. Restart macOS again.

aviramha6• 3 years ago

Why not enable easier override for specific scenarios? Turning off completely feels like a bad outcome

chongli2• 3 years ago

That’s like telling me to remove the front door of my house rather than letting me have a key to unlock it.

howinteresting2• 3 years ago

Then iOS apps stop working, right? The DRM regime requires SIP to be enabled.

Stallman was right about "treacherous computing".

vaughan• 3 years ago

Turning off SIP means you can’t run iOS apps on macOS. This sucks.

madeofpalk• 3 years ago

You can just disable SIP, no?

Gigachad3• 3 years ago

Yes, the "locked down dictatorship macos" is surprisingly permissive. Impressively you can even dual boot linux on Apple Silicon completely unrestricted without having to turn on off the boot chain security features of macOS.

lloeki• 3 years ago

Under "Security and Privacy" there's been "Developer Tools" for a while, within which I only ever saw Terminal.app (but any app could be added)

I'm not sure what it really does (could not find any docs, maybe someone can enlighten?) but the text made me think it could allow stuff like running unsigned debuggers:

    Allow the applications below to run software locally that does not meet the system's security policies

Again I'm really not sure, but maybe it can cover some use cases without going the nuclear route of fully disabling SIP?

memco• 3 years ago

I Would be interested to know more about it too. I have been interested in running a piece of software that needs SIP partially disabled, but I’d I could just grant it exemption I would prefer that to a blanket removal.

Funny thing is all computers used to run without SIP, but since they added it I’m now hesitant to turn it off even though I’m not any worse off than I used to be.

macshome• 3 years ago

It relaxes the signing requirements and malware signature checks for binaries run in the Terminal. This way you can build and test stuff without needing to relax the security posture of the entire Mac.

scarface742• 3 years ago

Yes because it’s not like bad things can happen when SIP is turned off. Not always malicious, it’s often ineptness

https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/09/25/google-chrome-upd...

antihero• 3 years ago

This is interesting. I’m guessing just having a patched shell binary and forking stuff from within that wouldn’t work.

aviramha6• 3 years ago

You could patch a shell binary, but you'd ultimately want to use other binaries as well. The most common example we had is when people tried to run our software with `pyenv` which was a shell script that used other system binaries + shell scripts

WirelessGigabit• 3 years ago

While the explanation is super cool it makes me feel nervous. None of this did supported. APIs change without notice, as you don't have a contract. You're relying on the fact that there is an x64 version available.

aviramha6• 3 years ago

Most odds is when x64 binary will stop shipping, arm64e won't be in preview mode anymore and we will be able to just do the re-signing part. (Which is supported)

ghostpepper• 3 years ago

It's pretty much expected that if you publish a method for working around a security feature it will be patched quickly. Cool research if that was the intention but if you're building a product around this... you're going to have a bad time.

eyalbukchin3• 3 years ago

This is detailed in the post, but the security feature i.e. preventing injected libraries access to entitlements isn't actually bypassed here. Rather the binary is run without these entitlements (which aren't required anyway for mirrord's use case).

pseufaux• 3 years ago

Killed! And it was so young.

This got far more of a chuckle from me than it should have. Must have had a long day or far to little sleep.

pedrow• 3 years ago

Would it be an option to compile your own versions of `ls` et al., maybe from the Darwin source (if available, I don't know) or one of the BSDs? Does what you're trying to do depend on the specific implementation of Apple's utilities?

eyalbukchin3• 3 years ago

Maybe, we haven't looked into that option for the following reasons:

a. It would require that we maintain a potentially pretty big list of self-compiled binaries

b. It would be an alteration of what the user's running, which we try to keep to a minimum, as mirrord's commonly used as a testing tool

david2ndaccount• 3 years ago

This is a strange product they’re selling. You run your binary on on macOS but presumably your server is running linux. Why are you trying to run Darwin executables as if they were in the cloud when that is not what will actually be deployed? Shouldn’t the testing at least be done from a linux machine?

eyalbukchin3• 3 years ago

Ideally! And it can be run on a Linux machine if the user prefers. But if you code on a Mac, mirrord still lets you go through a good number of test iterations (by letting your process run with network input/output, file content and environment variables from the cloud) before having to deploy your code to a Linux machine for that (hopefully) final round of testing.

jbverschoor• 3 years ago

I have no clue what this mirrord does. Is it some kind of API proxy? What if I don't have 'pods', also, shouldn't it be called redirect_api? mirror sounds like it's mirrorring.

Why would I need this? or whatever this does?

aviramha6• 3 years ago

mirrord is a tool for backend engineers that enables them to work on a remote environment without needing to deploy there or actually run there. It makes the iteration time (code -> test -> [review] -> deploy) faster since you don't replace the remote service also, which means many devs can work the same time.

You can read more about it here https://metalbear.co/blog/mirrord-3.0-is-out/

Fun with macOS's Sip

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