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Updates to Full Disk Access in macOS

309 points · 219 comments · notfirstpost

  1. moecables · · focus · HN ↗
    IMHO, it's good to add more specific controls for this. After reading this, I went and checked my list of app with full disk access:

    - Ghostty (fine, it's my terminal)

    - Alfred (fine, I use it for searching everywhere)

    Then I have a few turned off:

    - Spotify (why does it need full disk access) ??

    - Gemini (nope, don't need it to know everything about my computer)

    1. 0c3ca83 · · focus · HN ↗
      - Ghostty (fine, it's my terminal)

      But your terminal shouldn't be accessing any files; you just need to be able to launch /bin/zsh or whatever you use as your shell. The shell needs to be able to access files, but its container doesn't.

      Of course, you could go farther. For example, on OpenBSD, even /bin/ksh has been somewhat sandboxed; it can see most of the file system, but the things it can do have been limited:

        if (pledge("stdio rpath wpath cpath fattr flock getpw proc "
            "exec tty id", NULL) == -1) {
      1. saagarjha · · focus · HN ↗
        macOS attributes shell commands to their parent app bundle.
        1. 0c3ca83 · · focus · HN ↗
          That seems like a massive hole in the model that would make it very hard to lock down multi-process/privsep programs like sshd.
          1. saagarjha · · focus · HN ↗
            Sandboxing something like that is challenging, yes. But probably not for this reason you can always disclaim responsibility for your process.
            1. 0c3ca83 · · focus · HN ↗
              It really isn't; the program just needs to be able to declare what it expects it should be able to do, and what it expects its children should be able to do. The latter doesn't need to be a subset of the former.
              1. mindwok · · focus · HN ↗
                If the child could do different things to the parent malicious processes would spawn child processes to do stuff they shouldn’t be able to do, though
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