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To give specific examples, it is totally unclear why the article recommends creating an unprivileged account (the default user account is already unprivileged w

To give specific examples, it is totally unclear why the article recommends creating an unprivileged account (the default user account is already unprivileged without entering a password for anything That's not correct. The first account created is an Admin account. It has more privileges than a Standard account. Try the following in macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 as a Standard account then again as an Admin account. Open a terminal shell, and: cd /Applications touch fubar That will succeed in one of the accounts and fail with Permission denied in the other account. It is left as an exercise for the user to figure out which is which. :)

notafraudster 8y ago
It's true the group on /Applications is "admin", and thus mechanically there exist things that the default user account can do than an unprivileged account can't do. Not to put you on the spot, but, can you think of an example that isn't a toy example and actually reflects a potential harm? Okay, so I can write to Applications. But I can't use that ability to install an application that actually has permissions to do anything real, right?
- PhantomGremlin 8y ago
  Okay, so I can write to Applications. But I can't use that ability to install an application that actually has permissions to do anything real, right? Apple's System Integrity Protection only applies to pre-installed programs. I just now screwed around with the following object and the system let me do it: /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox If I can do that from Terminal, then what's to stop some malicious JavaScript from doing that IRL? Once user installed programs in /Applications are fair game, it becomes much easier to subvert macOS. By allowing untrusted binaries, you're essentially saying to the world "Go ahead, run any binary you want on my computer as an unprivileged user. macOS will protect my system from you". Not me. I'd rather make it just that much more difficult to keep malware off my computer. Setting aside everything else, the whole meltdown/spectre thing is enough for me to want to minimize the random untrusted code I run. And even if macOS itself is safe, those random binaries can still exfiltrate all my user data as an unprivileged user. They can mine Monero. They can participate in a botnet. All of that is possible without subverting macOS. No. Just no.

notafraudster 8y ago

It's true the group on /Applications is "admin", and thus mechanically there exist things that the default user account can do than an unprivileged account can't do. Not to put you on the spot, but, can you think of an example that isn't a toy example and actually reflects a potential harm? Okay, so I can write to Applications. But I can't use that ability to install an application that actually has permissions to do anything real, right?

PhantomGremlin 8y ago
Okay, so I can write to Applications. But I can't use that ability to install an application that actually has permissions to do anything real, right? Apple's System Integrity Protection only applies to pre-installed programs. I just now screwed around with the following object and the system let me do it: /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox If I can do that from Terminal, then what's to stop some malicious JavaScript from doing that IRL? Once user installed programs in /Applications are fair game, it becomes much easier to subvert macOS. By allowing untrusted binaries, you're essentially saying to the world "Go ahead, run any binary you want on my computer as an unprivileged user. macOS will protect my system from you". Not me. I'd rather make it just that much more difficult to keep malware off my computer. Setting aside everything else, the whole meltdown/spectre thing is enough for me to want to minimize the random untrusted code I run. And even if macOS itself is safe, those random binaries can still exfiltrate all my user data as an unprivileged user. They can mine Monero. They can participate in a botnet. All of that is possible without subverting macOS. No. Just no.