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796 points _Microft | 2 comments | | HN request time: 1.439s | source
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xenophonf ◴[] No.22737073[source]
I missed the part where Zoom is holding people's computers for ransom, or formatting the drive, or exfiltrating sensitive information to criminals or state intelligence officers, or mining bitcoin, or other similarly malicious behaviors.

An admin can write to /Applications without privilege escalation? That's a macOS bug. If the operating system didn't rely on an 80s-style put-all-the-executables-in-one-place app launch paradigm, maybe there'd be less incentive for app developers to ignore the per-user Applications folder that macOS supports.

An app can spoof or abuse privilege escalation dialogs? That's because macOS doesn't implement an Orange Book-style Trusted Path. It's why Windows and similar operating systems have secure attention keys in the first place.

So yeah, Zoom is (ab)using flaws in macOS to get itself installed with minimum fuss, but it isn't doing it with evil intent. They fixed past issues; they'll probably fix this. Meanwhile, these long-standing macOS security flaws won't be addressed by Apple, who has a terrible track record about these things except when it lets people bypass their App Store.

P.S. As an enterprise customer, I'm much more worried about end-to-end encryption in Zoom, and the apparent lack thereof. I'm also not sure how that compares with other video conferencing services.

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rainforest ◴[] No.22737135[source]
> So yeah, Zoom is (ab)using flaws in macOS to get itself installed with minimum fuss, but it isn't doing it with evil intent.

But... why? What other software vendors look at the OS security model from a viewpoint of 'how do we bypass this as much as possible?' If it's not evil intent, what is it, incompetence?

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1. xenophonf ◴[] No.22738561[source]
/Applications is writable by admins. There is no O/S security model to bypass.
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2. rainforest ◴[] No.22739129[source]
It has a pre-flight script (which isn't supposed to change anything) that installs it (and its browser extensions, and a kernel extension at some point in the past) in the most widely available place the current user has privileges to (it installs in their home directory if they aren't an admin).

So yes, there is some blame to be laid at the OS for running binaries with the privileges the current user has, but it's clear that the installer doesn't behave like a regular installer would.