18 Jan
2023
18 Jan
'23
11:08 p.m.
Apple's unreasonable hardening has been the latest deterent to my ever wanting to use
macOS as a personal driver. I've got a Mac as my daily driver for work, it can
happily stay with work until I can decide how the filesystem is laid out and what folders
I, as the root user, can and can't interact with from user land. I own my machine,
not Apple.
- Matt G.
------- Original Message -------
On Wednesday, January 18th, 2023 at 8:59 AM, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 11:39 AM Larry McVoy
<lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
Someone once told me that if they had physical
access to a Unix box, they
would get root. That has been true forever and it's even more true today,
pull the root disk, mount it on Linux, drop your ssh keys in there or add
a no password root or setuid a shell, whatever, if you can put your hands
on it, you can get in.
A reasonable point, but I think it really depends on the UNIX implementation I suspect.
Current mac OS is pretty well hardened from this, with their current enclaves and needing
to boot home to Apple to get keys if things are not 100% right. Not saying you or I can
not, but basically means the same cracking tricks you need to use for iPhones. It's
not as easy as you describe.
The ubiquitous Internet/WiFi changed the rules - as you can start to keep some set of
keys somewhere else and then encrypt the local volumes. In fact, one of the things they do
if mac OS boot detects that root has been modified (it has a crypto index stored away when
it was made read-only), the boot rolls back to the last root snapshot -- since they are
all read-only that works. In fact, it is a PITA to update/fix things like traditional
scripts (for instance the scripts in the /etc/periodic area). Basically, they make it
really unnatural to change the root files system, make a new snapshot and index (I have
yet to see it documented although, with much pain, I previously created a procedure that
is close -- i.e. it once worked on my pre-Ventura Mac - but currently -- fails, so I need
to some more investigation when I can bring this back to the top of the
importance/curiosity stack (I have a less than satisfying end around for now so I'm
ignoring doing it properly).
Clem
ᐧ