What I don’t see this paper focus on is security offered by the OS. Historically and commonly, for “normal people” apps, we’ve only been able to rely on one kin

What I don’t see this paper focus on is security offered by the OS. Historically and commonly, for “normal people” apps, we’ve only been able to rely on one kind of compartmentalisation: memory is not readable between apps. However, any file the user has access to is fair game for any app. This is a Bad Time for any password manager, or really any app (think e.g. about your email cache in a thunderbird profile, or Firefox session tokens which can be siphoned , etc). For ages, on Unix this could be solved with users and daemonisation. Later came SELinux which is criminally underused. In the popular OS market, for a while there was flocker, on OSX. It used event hooks in the kernel to allow fine grained control over filesystem access, locking certain dirs down to certain apps. The app was bought by some enterprise offering (f-secure) and taken offline. The creator (Jonathan Zdziarski) was then hired by Apple. Recently, similar features have been rolled out by Apple natively for OSX. Try reading your iMail or calendar cache using the terminal: you’ll get an iOS-like pop up window asking you if this app has permission to your mail, or contacts. This is a step in the right direction. All that’s left is for Apple to allow the user (or app developers) to specify such locks ourselves. This was already possible with flocker, but unfortunately that’s nowhere to be found, anymore. Perhaps it’s possible for apps delivered through the App Store? This would solve the problem that a password manager offers any process access to your full (encrypted) password DB, which is a pretty serious problem (makes the master password too valuable!). Given the direction things are moving in, and the hire of Jonathan, I’m very hopeful this will eventually arrive. It would be a tremendous win for security on OSX. This everything-goes mentality of FS access has been a pet peeve of mine for over a decade. :) and, tbh, I think it’s a much more relevant attack vector than some process “reading memory”. https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/06/f-secure-buys-little-flocker-to-upgrade-its-mac-security-play/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/06/f-secure-buys-little-flock...