macOS unable to open any non-Apple application

Champions of privacy, phoning home a hash of every executable your computer runs!

> Champions of privacy, phoning home a hash of every executable your computer runs!

What’s the matter with privacy? That’s a basic signature check, and you can do so while preserving privacy by using salted hashes or a similar solution.

I don’t understand how salted hashes would obfuscate the query. Private information retrieval is much more complicated than private password storage, and how do we know what the protocol is?

A centralized repository of all your executable hashes is a high precision fingerprint.

For one, they now have a list of everyone running Tor.

There are two major somewhat misleading bits of buzz around macOS “phoning home” all of our executables.

1: among Windows, macOS and Linux only Linux distros don’t do such checks, and most of end-user Linux installations are arguably secure in spite of this—mostly because they are very rare and thus not a priority target for malware.

2: this only concerns files you launch. If you wrap your binary invocation in a shell script, that shell script’s hash will be sent, not your binary’s.

What does the author of the operating system phoning home have to do with Linux not being a target for malware? It seems like you're mixing up two different issues with this.

Phoning home in this case is done to check whether an app’s signed with a valid certificate. Not checking that opens user’s machine to attacks where malware successfully pretends to be an authentic trusted app, likely gaining access privileges (Keychain, etc.) granted to that app by the user previously.

Linux distros can arguably get away without these checks since their users are typically more aware of what they are launching, but importantly also because they are not as big a target due to smaller user bases.

They can perfectly do that without recurring to sending the hashes, using asymmetric cryptography.

But... this way the also gather some data.

Yes it is, but merely sending hashes doesn’t mean such a centralized repository exists. We need more information on the actual implementation.

Enablers, that is what they are. If the EU manages to push that anti-encryption thing through, Apple will be the one forced to remove the App from your PC. 1984 is here already.

Don't Linux distros accomplish these checks with GPG key signing, which don't need to phone home?

Who is laughing at the Gentoo folks now ey?

Soon, phoning home a hash of every file your computer has.

Does it ensure the executable you downloaded and granted access to is still the same and was not modified afterwards?

Another reason is that if a cert (or a cert in the chain) is known to be compromised it can be revoked—would the mechanism used on Linux give some equivalent of that, or one has to be rely on bug trackers or apply updates to ensure trusted signatures are up-to-date?

The binary you get from your upstream repositories are signed but they aren't verified after that. On macOS if you download vagrant and grant it the ability to read your project directory I can't overwrite or modify your binary without it tripping the system and losing those privileges.