3 ms·

Which hardening options are Apple ignoring? I would have thought the standard types of ones (debian's default) would also be set on macos/ios, eg https://help.a

by mkj 5y ago

Which hardening options are Apple ignoring? I would have thought the standard types of ones (debian's default) would also be set on macos/ios, eg https://help.apple.com/xcode/mac/current/#/devf87a2ac8f https://help.apple.com/xcode/mac/current/#/devf87a2ac8f From what I can tell all NSO's rigmarole of making a virtual machine in the PDF parser is to work around the existing mitigations. I guess they could also turn on asan etc in production but that's more than a few percent slowdown.

WanderPanda 5y ago
I don‘t know anything about the benefits of these options but if the tradeoff is only a slowdown of the device this should be an option given to the user. Maybe even payed for („hardened version“ at buy time) or through a subscription.
- jmnicolas 5y ago
  Just an anecdote but I use GrapheneOS on my phone. It's a security focused OS based on Android AOSP with in particular a secure memory allocation function. The whole OS feels much slower than regular Google Android, Osmand (map app) is barely usable (on a Pixel 4XL which isn't a low end phone by any means). So I don't think we can discount how much slower a device will be with a more secure OS. It might be invisible on desktops, but certainly not on mobile.
  - jonway 5y ago
    If the secure OS had the same development velocity as the OEM profit OS, the secure OS would be much better optimized than it currently is and likely much much more secure, too. Android and iOS are optimized in general and for example Google or Samsung also optimize and distribute it for specific hardware. GrapheneOS is not well funded and has little influence in hardware development. The development of Graphene from AOSP is pretty much guaranteed to de-optimize it in the short term. While there is little about mobile that would cause a secure OS to be noticably slower, much less mature software with many fewer deployments is expectedly less optimized.
saagarjha 5y ago
Address Sanitizer is not meant to be used as security hardening.

by mkj 5y ago

WanderPanda 5y ago

I don‘t know anything about the benefits of these options but if the tradeoff is only a slowdown of the device this should be an option given to the user. Maybe even payed for („hardened version“ at buy time) or through a subscription.

jmnicolas 5y ago
Just an anecdote but I use GrapheneOS on my phone. It's a security focused OS based on Android AOSP with in particular a secure memory allocation function. The whole OS feels much slower than regular Google Android, Osmand (map app) is barely usable (on a Pixel 4XL which isn't a low end phone by any means). So I don't think we can discount how much slower a device will be with a more secure OS. It might be invisible on desktops, but certainly not on mobile.
- jonway 5y ago
  If the secure OS had the same development velocity as the OEM profit OS, the secure OS would be much better optimized than it currently is and likely much much more secure, too. Android and iOS are optimized in general and for example Google or Samsung also optimize and distribute it for specific hardware. GrapheneOS is not well funded and has little influence in hardware development. The development of Graphene from AOSP is pretty much guaranteed to de-optimize it in the short term. While there is little about mobile that would cause a secure OS to be noticably slower, much less mature software with many fewer deployments is expectedly less optimized.

saagarjha 5y ago

Address Sanitizer is not meant to be used as security hardening.