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Hacked by code-signed malware = Gatekeeper/SmartScreen useless
Dear HN,
I know we've recently had heated discussions if Apple's Gatekeeper is a useful tool for keeping out malware or of it's a nefarious spy operation or maybe just a new anti-competitive way to lock out 3rd party apps that don't pay 30% for App Store distribution. It was rarely mentioned, but Windows has kind of the same with SmartScreen, for the same stated purpose of security.
But much more important than Apple's or Microsoft's evilness level, I believe we should have a discussion about what to do about malware which is code-signed. It's not difficult to imagine that a determined criminal can find at least one badly secured 3rd party developer whose code-signing certificates can be abused.
This is not hypothetical, for example see this Microsoft postmortem:
https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2020/12/13/customers-protect-nation-state-cyberattacks/
which is about this attack:
https://www.solarwinds.com/securityadvisory
Modern software will update itself all the time and it's sending back and forth data to clouds all the time, so there are very few heuristics left to go by to determine if a given piece of code-signed application downloading executables and uploading data is a useful app like WhatsApp or a malware to be stopped.
What's your take?
- raxxorrax 6y agoI agree that these techniques are primarily for environment lock-down and constitute anti-competitive behavior. There can be an advantages to security in theory, but I don't think it is worth it to accept the downsides. For me the decision is made that I leave Windows development behind completely and I already found a new home on Linux. I still use Windows for some media consumption, but its place there is also threatened and slowly coming to an end. As for signing, we could have just used traditional certificates instead of these awful signing practices, but this is overall bad security in my opinion, that "accidentally" makes them a middle man for any software deployment.