They designed SIP to prevent anyone from modifying the operating system. And they designed the shims to operate in precisely the manner they did. I still don't

They designed SIP to prevent anyone from modifying the operating system. And they designed the shims to operate in precisely the manner they did. I still don't understand why you think the correct operation of the shims is somehow breaking SIP, because it's not. When using the shims even with a fake developer dir, the operating system files are not modified, and the shims are working precisely as documented. > A big part of SIP is preventing the end user from typing in their password to give a malicious program access to replace certain binaries installed in the /usr/bin directory (and a few other locations) And that hasn't changed. The binaries are not being replaced. > So basically they don't want git, or any other program, to work in a way they didn't intend - i.e. They don't want malware authors installing a riot kit by replacing binaries. No, they don't want malware authors to modify the operating system. Doing a non-privileged action (i.e. setting the env variable) in order to change the behavior seen when invoking /usr/bin/git really has no relation to SIP at all, that's jut working as intended. Besides, nothing of the behavior you describe has anything to do with root kits either. Someone who can point DEVELOPER_DIR at a malicious directory hasn't gained any privileges by doing so, and has not compromised the operating system in any way. > In essence, this is what this is doing. The main difference here is that instead of them needing to be root, they just create a directory, create a small script update an environment variable and optionally tweak .bashrc as the user and they have effectively added a wrapper to the XCode utility. With no need to elevate privileges. And without gaining any privileges. I've already said this multiple times before. The end result of all of this is they have no more privileges than they already needed to set this up in the first place. They've gained literally nothing from doing this. > I do wonder why they chose to write a program in a compiled language instead of using a shell script. Probably so they can codesign the binary, since you can't codesign shell scripts.