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Pretty easy to figure out what's going on: 1. You submit your app bundle and your credentials to Apple for notarization. 2. Apple records your information and
by rmrfrmrf 6y ago
Pretty easy to figure out what's going on:
1. You submit your app bundle and your credentials to Apple for notarization.
2. Apple records your information and goes through each library, framework, and your code, checking the code signing info and "fingerprint" of each for known malware.
3. Apple issues the ticket for stapling to the app bundle.
Now say, for example, that libffmpeg-0.1.2-beta2.dylib is found to mine cryptocurrency:
1. Apple goes through their database and finds the app where the malware was reported.
2. Apple marks that fingerprint as malicious.
3. Apple now flags any other apps that use libffmpeg-0.1.2-beta2.dylib (by checking the fingerprint) and disables any versions of any app running that version. Additionally, any other attempts to notarize apps with the malicious dylib are rejected.
Notarization provides 2 major benefits for devs that I can see:
1. Apple doesn't need to revoke your entire certificate just to block one version of an app.
2. Apple's audit trail of who notarized the app (and from where) prevents cases where stolen credentials result in a DoS of the victim (e.g. your account being locked, your name and address permabanned, and funds frozen).
- thw0rted 6y agoI'd be interested to see the track record since they implemented notarization. How often has it caught malware, both before and after the fact? I haven't seen any headlines about e.g. a popular application failing to launch one day because Apple found a miner in it some time after initial notarization.
- saagarjha 6y agoWhy can’t Apple just push that through XProtect?
- jolux 6y agoWhy not do both?
- saagarjha 6y agoBecause notarization has the very concrete downside of costing money to do, plus the fuzzier steps of it being a fairly complicated and often picky/opaque process to have to deal with when shipping your software.
- comex 6y agoThey can do that if they’ve obtained a copy of the specific binary with malware. But with notarization they can proactively scan for things that look like they might be malware, and follow up with either automatic rejection, or approval followed by manual inspection.
- saagarjha 6y agoOk, I guess that does make sense. Still, it does have the drawback that all distribution must go through Apple, and you need to now need to pay to develop software for the platform :(