Sandboxie mac
It is crucial to motivate the need for any mitigation Unfortunately, Apple does not provide an explicit threat model for the App Sandbox. Threat ModelĪ threat model states what you (a user / a mitigation / a security system) are protecting against (and also what’s not covered). My focus today is on implementation, configuration and design internals that might not be known to a wider audience. In this series of posts, I am sharing what I learned in the process. In 2018, I wrote my Master’s Thesis on the topic. Apple’s sandbox implementation lacks public documentation.
Sandboxie mac software#
The App Sandbox is no exception: it has had a massive impact on developers scrambling to sandbox their software which was largely designed without sandboxing in mind. No mitigation is perfect Mitigations have complexity, inspectability and debuggability costs. Security benefits afforded by sandboxing hinge on proper configuration and understanding of the sandbox mechanism itself. Sandboxed applications – even when compromised – can access only predefined parts of the system, limiting their damage potential and requiring attackers to escape the sandbox to compromise the system itself. In this way, sandboxing implements the foundational information security principle of least privilege, which states that programs and users should operate using the least amount of privilege necessary to complete a certain job. Sandboxing (a form of mandatory access control or MAC) uses per-application security policies to limit the actions a program may take and the resources it is allowed to access it aims to make what a program can do the same as what a program was made to do. Most of these capabilities and permissions however are never actually required by the executing program. On traditional UNIX systems, programs run as a user (in what’s referred to as discretionary access control - DAC), inheriting all her capabilities and permissions. It aims to reduce the damage of successful attacks on the host system. Accepting this reality, the focus of the last few decades has been on developing exploit mitigation techniques such as Address Space Layout Randomisation (ASLR) and Data Execution Prevention (DEP) which focus on increasing difficulty and costs for attackers. Any sufficiently complex software will contain vulnerabilities that can be abused by motivated attackers to subvert a program’s execution.
Sandboxie mac how to#
No-one knows how to design truly secure software.