I think I’m probably being dumb, but the gotcha here seems to be - ‘if I give an application permission to access a folder, it has access to the files in that folder’ - which is what I would expect??
Yes, you need to read more carefully. In particular:
“8. Confirm that Documents access for Insent is still disabled in Files & Folders.
“9. Whatever you do now, the app retains full access to Documents, no matter what is shown or set in Files & Folders.”
[…]
“Access restrictions shown in Privacy & Security settings, specifically those to protected locations in Files & Folders, aren’t an accurate or trustworthy reflection of those that are actually applied. It’s possible for an app to have unrestricted access to one or more protected folders while its listing in Files & Folders shows it being blocked from access, or for it to have no entry at all in that list.”
"6. Click on Open from folder and select your Documents folder there. Confirm that works as expected and displays the name and contents of one of the text files in Documents."
It's because in step 6 the user explicitly selected the Documents folder.
The app can access the Documents folder because the user chose that directory in the native file browse dialog during the same run of the app. IMO that's a reasonable trade-off.
The problem is that this given permission doesn’t show in Files & Folders, and after turning it on and off there it still persists. The only way to revoke it is using some CLI command and restart the computer.
That's not what's happening here.
Forget about the first 5 steps. If you install the app and start from step 6, the behaviour will be the same. If the user chooses the Documents folder in the browse window in an app, the app can use the contents of the Documents folder without the need for that permission in the Settings page.
The Privacy settings applies only to access to the Documents folder without the user interaction.
No, it is, the comment you're replying to is correct in what it said to you.
> The Privacy settings applies only to access to the Documents folder without the user interaction.
Yes, BUT, the user interaction is irrevocable. There are two user interactions here, one is "please access Documents this one time" and the second is "please don't let this app access Documents again."
Of course, if the stakes were higher you wouldn't even think to defend this behavior. Like if you were dealing with a nuclear weapon launcher and there was a big panel saying "TARGETING SYSTEMS: 0 targets (Permission Lock sandbox excluding 450 potential targets needing approval)" and then you poked around and found out "uh... why can I still go into the interface and target Milan and the big glowy 'launch missiles' light then starts lighting up and presumably I can launch a nuclear strike on Milan?!" and someone says, "oh yeah, that's because back when we were demoing it, the general had us punch in a random city to show what the targeting UI looked like, and we randomly chose Milan... it's okay, to fix it someone just needs to go and manually remove the warhead and put in a different one and then we'll restart the system and it'll forget all its targeting data for the old warhead" -- that'd strike you as unsustainable.
But this is very low-stakes for us so it seems less outrageous, but fundamentally it is a solid buggy behavior, "The UI makes it sound like there is only one system at play here, but there are actually two and the other system can override a specific revocation that's placed at the level the UI controls." Even if there are going to be two systems, you expect that their security controls will both be followed, or that the second one will know enough to be able to say "I say no, but I am being overruled" in its status panel.
I think the issue here though is that the permission for access remains even after you're not using the open/save dialog and that's not obvious (or controllable from the UI) after the fact.
I think it's reasonable to expect that an application gets access to a file you access through open/save, but the fact that the access to the directory and all the items in that directory persists after that isn't necessarily expected. Especially given that the near equivalent workflow on iOS doesn't behave like this and that's what a lot of users would probably expect. On iOS an app can ask for access to your photos, which you can allow, or limit to specific photos or deny. If you allow access to specific photos and then the photo selector appears, even if you chose an album, the app will only get and retain access to the specific individual photos you gave it access to. It can not read the contents or even the names of any of the other photos in your library.
It seems pretty reasonable to expect that if the "Documents" folder permission is turned off for an app on macOS and you have given the application access to a specific document inside your documents folder, that the application would not also get (and retain) access to read from all the other folders and files within your documents folder.
I agree that this is the default behavior of most desktop OSes (including macOS), but it's also something that seems reasonable for Apple to change given how important sandboxing is to them in general, and how important it is in the broader context of always connected computers with multitudes of arbitrarily networked applications running.
The point is that (a) it’s misleading that the app has access to the folder while the settings claim that it doesn’t, and (b) there is no reasonable way for the user to revoke the implicitly given permission.
You don't need that permission if the user gives their implicit consent by selecting the Documents directory in the browse window. That's why most apps don't even show up in the Privacy Settings at all. Most apps don't need that, because they don't try to access that directory on their own. They only do it when the user selects the directory.
I guess the improvement can be to show the implicit consent in the privacy settings page as well, and have a way to revoke it.
I don't think any long-term implicit consent is acceptable. I would not expect that after opening one document in a folder without being shown any permission prompt, that permissions have been permanently altered. I would never even go look to see if it was "implicitly permitted".
Without a prompt or notice, I would expect only that the app has access to the file or directory I chose until the app is closed/quit.
Yeah, it's less of a "GOTCHA!" and more of a weird use case that Apple engineers probably didn't think through all the way. Doesn't seem like a difficult fix at all.
If the app opens a window and prompts the user to select a directory to save a file or load a file, should that access be recorded in the privacy settings page? I'd argue that maybe there should be a verbose version of the privacy settings page, where if you _really_ want to you can see every dir that every app has ever accessed, but the vast majority of users don't care.[0]
I'm less caffeinated this morning though so maybe I misread the whole argument.
[0] edit: And whether the app still has access to that dir. Which maybe that was the point of the article. I am just skeptical generally of these kinds of exposés because while they're generally pretty fair, they'll inevitably get picked up by the geniuses on r/pcmasterrace who will spin it into "Apple Privacy and Security Settings Let Terrorists Invade Your Family Photos"
The real problem with this isn't so much that it doesn't show the implicit consent. That would be nice but not a big deal. It's that it shows explicit non-consent that is getting ignored.
8. Confirm that Documents access for Insent is still disabled in Files & Folders.
When you use iOS's "limited access" permissions to give an app access to some of your photos but not the whole library, the photo picker UI does a pretty good job of letting you easily do three things:
1) Grant access to a photo
2) Identify which photos you've granted access to
3) Revoke previously granted access
macOS's concession to give access to whole folders at a time is necessary for real software to work, but they haven't done a good job of items 2 and 3.
Is this part true? The article's fix involves running a command and rebooting the computer. If restarting the app was sufficient, surely you wouldn't need the command/reboot?
I guess not. Looks like if you choose the Documents directory once, you give your implicit permission to the app until you choose another restricted directory.
This is so typical for Apple software "quality". While a truly love some of the features Apple has put into my pocket, I am noticing since years that at least iOS is the first commercially sold platform where I sometimes have to press a boolean toggle twice to have it take effect. They seem to have a lot of bugs around UI synchronisation.
That's not quite it either. It's more along the lines of "I revoked access via one mechanism, then granted it via a different mechanism, and the setting UI for the first mechanism doesn't reflect the second action".
There's no privilege escalation here, but there is a misleading privacy settings UI, which offers no obvious way to audit/revoke permissions in the second case
- it's non-obvious that the second mechanism (a file picker) is a permission granting mechanism.
- it's non-obvious that the second mechanism (a file picker) is a permission granting mechanism whose permission survives the action context that triggered the file picker (e.g "pick a folder to do action A" also magically imbues similarly gated actions B C D and Z with access to that folder, possibly non-interactively even).
- it's non-obvious that the second mechanism (a file picker) is a permission granting mechanism whose permission propagates to an action gated by the first mechanism, a first mechanism for which "Yes" means yes but "No" means "Maybe, depending on past unrelated actions that triggered an unrelated permission mechanism"
This is a result of trying to retrofit a series of tighter security measures on top of a system that was not originally designed for them, in a way that is both understandable to users but also doesn't break back-compat with APIs (and therefore a lot of existing third-party apps that are seldom updated) too badly. I'm not saying Apple did a perfect job here, but it's a hard problem.
Yes, the problem could probably be "solved" by adding more UI, but "more UI" is not always a good solution. The more UI that exists, the less likely the user is to successfully navigate it. On the other hand, adding additional complexity to an existing UI is also fraught with potential for new bugs and edge cases. Again, not defending the status quo, but I can see how it might have ended up like this.
This is worth spending more time on trying to improve, and perhaps it is reasonable to expect better from an almost-$4tn company. But at the same time, a potential solution is far from easy or obvious, and there is a risk of making things worse if not done with an extreme level of thought and consideration.
(Alternate pessimistic take: A large number of users don't care or read anything, they just click "allow" on anything that gets in their way. A smaller set of users are terrified and disgusted by repeated invasions of the privacy and click "deny" on everything. None of these implementations are doing any good for either group. The allow/deny design pattern is badly broken and in need of rethinking.)
Not quite. The steps are revoking permission in the UI (which works as expected), then implicitly granting permission in a way that the UI does not reflect but quietly persists.
> In this Friday’s magic demonstration, I’m going to show how what you see in Privacy & Security settings can be misleading, when it tells you that an app doesn’t have access to a protected folder, but it really does.
One might expect macOS to recognize “you selected a folder that’s already got a UI associated with it” and to wire this up on the backend through the UI rather than creating a simple path exception that leaves the UI nonfunctional. I would have just filed a feedback report about it; but, the outrage-framing of that is, in historical context for this particular site, normal. They have posted extensively about Gatekeeper and TCC issues and seem to encounter them rather more reliably than others do, and released various tools (including today’s!) to support debugging, so certainly I empathize!
It’s really poorly written. After reading it all I still can’t figure out what’s the mechanism by which revoked permissions are hanging around, which is what would actually be interesting here.
My impression is that the revoked permissions do not persist. Rather, an interactive window running under the user’s name has implied access to the user’s home folders, regardless of what’s been set under “Files & Folders” (which still applies for background/non-interactive processes).
I could absolutely be missing something here, but the title would be accurate in saying, “MacOS ACLs aren’t terribly intuitive”. But I think the behavior they’re documenting is intended behavior.
Nope. The user is not revoking the access that they granted. They are revoking general access to a folder, but since there is no way to revoke specific access nothing happens.
That's the beauty of using a GUI-first operating system!
> only way you can protect your Documents folder from access by Insent is to run the following command in Terminal: tccutil reset All co.eclecticlight.Insent then restart your Mac
Jobs is turning in his grave. There are lots of stories of this conflict at NeXT and Mac OS X where there's a quick fix but not via GUI, which was one of the many things that incensed him.
I'm sure there are some great ones, but it was 5-10 years ago when I last read one, and it was fantastic. It's nearly impossible to do a web search for it right now, probably because of Google's bias towards recency. I know it's been linked on Hacker News many times, so maybe somebody else has better info here.
Even if you're not an Apple fan, these sorts of stories are kind of great for learning about product development and companies in general, I think. jwz's stories of Netscape are also phenomenal. (Just don't click on any HN links that go to jwz.org, or you'll have to clear cookies to see any content there in the future. He's not a fan of the exploitation that startups frequently do to their employees and views HN as a primary channel of promoting that exploitation.)
Speaking of GUI weirdness, I've seen a couple of relatively newer macbooks do this thing where the laptop is shutdown with wifi disabled, but after login on startup the wifi icon displays the wifi scanning mode as if the wifi is enabled and looking for networks before reverting to the wifi disabled display icon.
Is this a GUI bug or is the wifi disabled setting overrided for a split second on startup? I haven't looked into it, but the latter would be extremely concerning.
Eye-opening findings. After reading the article I revoked every folder permission and tested: Insent still reads Documents even when the UI shows "None". This is a serious trust failure; transparency is supposed to be the whole point of those preference panes.
No. You get prompted something like “Application wants access to your Documents folder” and “Application wants access to your Downloads folder” on first attempt of each folder.
The problem with Mac’s sandbox system is that it’s giving me some PTSD of Windows UAC. It’s inventing a solution to a problem that might exist in small doses, but instead gives users permission fatigue.
I personally think the traditional *nix model has served us quite well, and elective sandboxing using containers (à la Docker and so on) is quite good. The Mac sandbox model is probably ok for most normal users, but for power users is infuriating at times. Multiple restarts of Mac and various processes (and when you realize not enough scopes have been granted, another subsequent restart). I think Mac forcing all users into its sandbox system has been one of my least favorite impacts since upgrading macOS, leading to the enshittification of macOS.
The craziest thing is background processes started by Terminal/iTerm (such as tmux) can inherit Terminal or iTerm’s elevated status even when Terminal or iTerm are no longer running, dead, or killed. So you’ll have a bunch of elevated processes without the elevated parent or grandparent process running—it makes me feel the whole permissions scheme is more performative than actually useful.
I think the bigger issue is that way too many devs still live in the extremely dated paradigm of “anything has access to everything all the time”, even though this model has repeatedly proven itself unworkable (particularly for anybody using proprietary software, which is notorious for sticking its fingers in places it has no business touching).
The way macOS handles permissions with user prompts might be the wrong UX, but giving every program carte blanche by default is definitely not the answer either.
It’s dangerous, particularly for those of us who are developing and publishing software that’s used by many thousands of people — we’re juicy targets and every time we disable protections in the name of convenience and carelessly run random third party software with unfettered access we’re playing with fire. I find myself consistently stunned by the flippant attitude SWEs take towards securing their systems. Our confidence that we’re too smart to fall victim is entirely misplaced.
I feel the opposite with Mac permissions (or Linux or Windows). Hardly anything asks me, and it seems like everything has access to everything. But same conclusion here, if I don't trust something, I want to explicitly sandbox it.
Note that this isn't "Mac's sandbox system", it's TCC. That's an important distinction to make, because apps that have opted into the proper App Sandbox can't do this... they don't even have the ability to display a prompt for direct access to Documents/.
With the App Sandbox, sandbox extensions are issues whenever you open a file using the file picker. They only last until the app is restarted.
A caveat is that you can save "Security Scoped bookmarks" (basically a signed base64 blob [1]) and pass that around to preserve access, but that isn't very common.
I feel like I can mostly use containers on macOS. Is there a different sense that people are using containers on *nix? Or are you referring to all the macOS specific software footguns?
I would like to be able to run arbitrary code with gradual/granular privilege escalation. (e.g iOS/android with more affordances and escape hatches. macOS is getting there, but it's been a pretty bumpy/potholed road). Right now if I download a random github repo, I'd put it in a docker container and give it ports/volumes/etc.
I was building a lightweight imitation of OpenClaw. Just a Claude.md and iMessage watcher. I had to play around with Privacy a lot to be able to read my iMessages database, and do a lot of iTerm restarting.
I remember it being worse a while ago. But most of the time I can drag a binary into Settings->Privacy & Security->Full Disk Access or other things (Accessibility API). Maybe other issues come up.
I feel like it should still be much easier, but the general sandboxing model seems directionally functional. (My understanding is containerization isn't a silver bullet security-wise, still requires fiddling, and would be a resource hog ram-wise if not CPU?)
I wish I could pick a parent folder/file and get a box to control everything (network/disk/folders/peripherals/accessibility).
One of the worst cases happens immediately after logging into a fresh Mac, or after upgrading one. You’re instantly hit with a barrage of requests from all the installed apps and their various permissions. It makes for such a terrible initial user experience, it’s utterly baffling someone at Apple has signed it off. They used to poke fun at Windows in their ads, but UAC has never been that terrible in my experience.
There's another "security UI" issue in the latest macOS, that's been there for at least a few versions.
I go into "Privacy & Security", "Full Disk Access". A bunch of apps added themselves in there (Anki, Fission, Microsoft Autoupdate, WhatsApp), the toggle is disabled and I've never enabled it. Ok, whatever.
But when I go into "Files & Folders", and under those apps I see "Full Disk Access" in gray. Apps that have Full Disk Access toggled on look identical, with "Full Disk Access" in gray. What the hell am I supposed to make of that?
Is it a bug? Do they have full disk access? Is the UI trying to imply that those apps are solely controlled by the FullDisk toggle and are ineligible to request granular permissions for Desktop/Documents? Or that they are eligible, but haven't requested it? Or maybe they did request it, and I granted it, but I don't get to see it? Who knows?
2) The suggestion in the article to do tccutil reset All co.eclecticlight.Insent and reboot didn't actually work for me. However, I did first delete the Insent listing in Privacy & Security System Settings, which could have made a difference?
3) A plaintext search of the whole Tahoe volume from another volume with SIP disabled failed to reveal where this persistent access is stored. It's definitely not in the standard TCC.db files. Perhaps the permission is encrypted somewhere?
4) The article comments suggested that the com.apple.macl extended attribute is the cause, but it's not. Removing all macl attributes makes no difference.
5) The access appears to be to the whole Documents folder rather than any specific file in the folder. If I have multiple files in the folder, the Insent app will sometimes show the contents of one file and sometimes the contents of another.
Doesn’t seem like a bug to me - it’s just a poor UI. Two different security systems both working properly but only one has a UI to show the protections.
The app somehow gained a permanent permission that I didn't give and that I can't remove no matter what I do. That's not working properly in any sense.
The first thing I wondered after reading this article is whether there might be a scheduled task to run the permission reset similarly to how the author ran it via the command line.
It seems most likely that this is some kind of bug where that command or its underlying actions should be called every time the user unchecks something in the settings panel.
This is what we get when the iPhone’s permission system is grafted on top of a desktop OS that was never designed for it. I think they could have done something that is more Unix-like and yet friendly to the GUI end user.
It seems that author basically found a 0day and published it. It's for sure better than selling it on the dark web but maybe it's better first tell it to Apple?
Not exactly. It's not a "new" attack vector, any software which was malicious would have already been able to attack when you first gave it permission (a prerequisite for this sticky permission issue). If you had downloaded an app and discovered it was malicious the remedy would generally be to uninstall the app, not just "revoke the permission for the one folder".
It's not a good look for Apple, and it's not great that the permission revocation basically doesn't actually work, but any malware that could have infected the system due to this issue would have also been able to infect the system while the permission was still (intentionally) enabled.
Apple Security would instantly close it as "don't see the problem here" if you reported it to them. They have a poor reputation around TCC bug reports.
Not really, just an unintuitive security feature. You still need the user's permission to access that folder, but that permission is then persistent. I consider it a UX bug for sure but not an exploit.
I agree, it's a ui/ux problem. It would seem that using the open file dialog should also request access but I'm guessing that was too intrusive and the user action is seen as implicit authorization. Security is one of those things that should aways be explicit though.
imo, you can't really ever fully trust a closed-source system, which is why I advocate for linux distros, even though I'm a mac user myself (for now)
VPN should be properly implemented though as you're able to verify network requests on your own and don't necessarily have to trust apple. Best guarantee is to have a VPN at router level that can't be circumvented by anything (+ a trusted router vendor)
This is a few years old, but at one point Apple was happy to bypass VPN or firewall settings to allow their own apps to communicate[1]. I don't know if this is still true on Tahoe, but I wouldn't be surprised if at least the mechanism still exists. So "they run fine", but they may not do what you expect them to do when it comes to Apple's products/services.
No, this is definitely a bug. The Privacy and Security panel is part of Settings, which is definitely part of the OS. Saying the Open and Save panel somehow has priority suggests that the Privacy and Security panel is not looking at the same parameters as the Open and Save panel, ergo a bug.
It’s not a bug and that is clear if you don’t use the documents folder as your example. When granting specific access it is not the same system as when granting general Documents folder access.
Well duh, the purpose of Privacy and Security was never Privacy or security. The purpose is to lock you into Apple's ecosystem and prevent you from installing your own software.
This is exactly why the security model matters. If the OS or app can access your data, so can anyone who compromises it. The only real solution is client-side encryption where the server NEVER sees plaintext — your keys stay on your device.
We've been building something in this space — Cifer Security uses ML-KEM (post-quantum) for key encapsulation and Poseidon hashing, with Groth16 proofs for verifiability. The server is intentionally blind to what it's storing.
The macOS permission model is theater if the app itself isn't zero-knowledge. Privacy can't rely on UI toggles — it has to be cryptographic.
Another solution would be for people to make up their minds. Maybe it's time to give up entirely on multi-tasking support in the OS, because what's the point if all interoperability is going to be disabled "for security"? Might as well just go back to running one program at a time and close up all those security holes in one go.
Why everything has to be on the server? ok, Where are you going to store your client authentication tokens or decryption keys. A proper file system isolation is a key if you want a proper application sandboxing
I was considering buying a mini Mac, but there wasn't a way to encrypt it fully with Veracrypt and in the case of Francis Rawls the feds got pass Apples vault encryption. With the recent iPhone notification storage revelation I don't trust Apple at all.
I think it is an acceptable quirk for a permission system that has been retrofitted on top of an ecosystem which was not designed with that threat model in mind.
But sure, if I was assigned to make an all-purpose desktop operating system today from scratch, I would likely do this differently, but along with a bunch of other things I think (and the app would have to be implemented differently too).
I never used the ~/Documents folder. Lots of apps just trashed their stuff in there over the years making that folder entirely unusable for my actual document files. I would have to dig through the mess to find them. So I have to admit that I don't really understand the extra "care" Apple is doing to this particular folder. Same for the ~/Downloads folder: all my actual downloads go to some other disk, since the system disk is so small. Protecting this two folders would be entirely useless here.
IMHO where it really needs to be protected from when iCloud suddenly starts grabbing everything w/o the user's permission to upload it to some random Apple servers.
I think I’m probably being dumb, but the gotcha here seems to be - ‘if I give an application permission to access a folder, it has access to the files in that folder’ - which is what I would expect??
Yes, you need to read more carefully. In particular:
“8. Confirm that Documents access for Insent is still disabled in Files & Folders.
“9. Whatever you do now, the app retains full access to Documents, no matter what is shown or set in Files & Folders.”
[…]
“Access restrictions shown in Privacy & Security settings, specifically those to protected locations in Files & Folders, aren’t an accurate or trustworthy reflection of those that are actually applied. It’s possible for an app to have unrestricted access to one or more protected folders while its listing in Files & Folders shows it being blocked from access, or for it to have no entry at all in that list.”
"6. Click on Open from folder and select your Documents folder there. Confirm that works as expected and displays the name and contents of one of the text files in Documents."
It's because in step 6 the user explicitly selected the Documents folder.
The app can access the Documents folder because the user chose that directory in the native file browse dialog during the same run of the app. IMO that's a reasonable trade-off.
The problem is that this given permission doesn’t show in Files & Folders, and after turning it on and off there it still persists. The only way to revoke it is using some CLI command and restart the computer.
That's not what's happening here. Forget about the first 5 steps. If you install the app and start from step 6, the behaviour will be the same. If the user chooses the Documents folder in the browse window in an app, the app can use the contents of the Documents folder without the need for that permission in the Settings page.
The Privacy settings applies only to access to the Documents folder without the user interaction.
> That's not what's happening here.
No, it is, the comment you're replying to is correct in what it said to you.
> The Privacy settings applies only to access to the Documents folder without the user interaction.
Yes, BUT, the user interaction is irrevocable. There are two user interactions here, one is "please access Documents this one time" and the second is "please don't let this app access Documents again."
Of course, if the stakes were higher you wouldn't even think to defend this behavior. Like if you were dealing with a nuclear weapon launcher and there was a big panel saying "TARGETING SYSTEMS: 0 targets (Permission Lock sandbox excluding 450 potential targets needing approval)" and then you poked around and found out "uh... why can I still go into the interface and target Milan and the big glowy 'launch missiles' light then starts lighting up and presumably I can launch a nuclear strike on Milan?!" and someone says, "oh yeah, that's because back when we were demoing it, the general had us punch in a random city to show what the targeting UI looked like, and we randomly chose Milan... it's okay, to fix it someone just needs to go and manually remove the warhead and put in a different one and then we'll restart the system and it'll forget all its targeting data for the old warhead" -- that'd strike you as unsustainable.
But this is very low-stakes for us so it seems less outrageous, but fundamentally it is a solid buggy behavior, "The UI makes it sound like there is only one system at play here, but there are actually two and the other system can override a specific revocation that's placed at the level the UI controls." Even if there are going to be two systems, you expect that their security controls will both be followed, or that the second one will know enough to be able to say "I say no, but I am being overruled" in its status panel.
I think the issue here though is that the permission for access remains even after you're not using the open/save dialog and that's not obvious (or controllable from the UI) after the fact.
I think it's reasonable to expect that an application gets access to a file you access through open/save, but the fact that the access to the directory and all the items in that directory persists after that isn't necessarily expected. Especially given that the near equivalent workflow on iOS doesn't behave like this and that's what a lot of users would probably expect. On iOS an app can ask for access to your photos, which you can allow, or limit to specific photos or deny. If you allow access to specific photos and then the photo selector appears, even if you chose an album, the app will only get and retain access to the specific individual photos you gave it access to. It can not read the contents or even the names of any of the other photos in your library.
It seems pretty reasonable to expect that if the "Documents" folder permission is turned off for an app on macOS and you have given the application access to a specific document inside your documents folder, that the application would not also get (and retain) access to read from all the other folders and files within your documents folder.
I agree that this is the default behavior of most desktop OSes (including macOS), but it's also something that seems reasonable for Apple to change given how important sandboxing is to them in general, and how important it is in the broader context of always connected computers with multitudes of arbitrarily networked applications running.
The point is that (a) it’s misleading that the app has access to the folder while the settings claim that it doesn’t, and (b) there is no reasonable way for the user to revoke the implicitly given permission.
You don't need that permission if the user gives their implicit consent by selecting the Documents directory in the browse window. That's why most apps don't even show up in the Privacy Settings at all. Most apps don't need that, because they don't try to access that directory on their own. They only do it when the user selects the directory.
I guess the improvement can be to show the implicit consent in the privacy settings page as well, and have a way to revoke it.
I don't think any long-term implicit consent is acceptable. I would not expect that after opening one document in a folder without being shown any permission prompt, that permissions have been permanently altered. I would never even go look to see if it was "implicitly permitted".
Without a prompt or notice, I would expect only that the app has access to the file or directory I chose until the app is closed/quit.
Yeah, it's less of a "GOTCHA!" and more of a weird use case that Apple engineers probably didn't think through all the way. Doesn't seem like a difficult fix at all.
If the app opens a window and prompts the user to select a directory to save a file or load a file, should that access be recorded in the privacy settings page? I'd argue that maybe there should be a verbose version of the privacy settings page, where if you _really_ want to you can see every dir that every app has ever accessed, but the vast majority of users don't care.[0]
I'm less caffeinated this morning though so maybe I misread the whole argument.
[0] edit: And whether the app still has access to that dir. Which maybe that was the point of the article. I am just skeptical generally of these kinds of exposés because while they're generally pretty fair, they'll inevitably get picked up by the geniuses on r/pcmasterrace who will spin it into "Apple Privacy and Security Settings Let Terrorists Invade Your Family Photos"
The real problem with this isn't so much that it doesn't show the implicit consent. That would be nice but not a big deal. It's that it shows explicit non-consent that is getting ignored.
Other comment seems accurate
You “feed” it the document.
Same way you select a picture on iOS. It is your deliberate decision and intent to open the document with that application.
That is totally different from the application having permission to scan and view anything in for example the downloads folder
When you use iOS's "limited access" permissions to give an app access to some of your photos but not the whole library, the photo picker UI does a pretty good job of letting you easily do three things:
1) Grant access to a photo
2) Identify which photos you've granted access to
3) Revoke previously granted access
macOS's concession to give access to whole folders at a time is necessary for real software to work, but they haven't done a good job of items 2 and 3.
> during the same run of the app
Is this part true? The article's fix involves running a command and rebooting the computer. If restarting the app was sufficient, surely you wouldn't need the command/reboot?
I guess not. Looks like if you choose the Documents directory once, you give your implicit permission to the app until you choose another restricted directory.
Screen time is swiss cheese as well, not surprised.
This is so typical for Apple software "quality". While a truly love some of the features Apple has put into my pocket, I am noticing since years that at least iOS is the first commercially sold platform where I sometimes have to press a boolean toggle twice to have it take effect. They seem to have a lot of bugs around UI synchronisation.
The gotcha is “I gave it permission, then revoked permission in the UI, but it still has permission.”
That's not quite it either. It's more along the lines of "I revoked access via one mechanism, then granted it via a different mechanism, and the setting UI for the first mechanism doesn't reflect the second action".
There's no privilege escalation here, but there is a misleading privacy settings UI, which offers no obvious way to audit/revoke permissions in the second case
I think the issue is more like:
- it's non-obvious that the second mechanism (a file picker) is a permission granting mechanism.
- it's non-obvious that the second mechanism (a file picker) is a permission granting mechanism whose permission survives the action context that triggered the file picker (e.g "pick a folder to do action A" also magically imbues similarly gated actions B C D and Z with access to that folder, possibly non-interactively even).
- it's non-obvious that the second mechanism (a file picker) is a permission granting mechanism whose permission propagates to an action gated by the first mechanism, a first mechanism for which "Yes" means yes but "No" means "Maybe, depending on past unrelated actions that triggered an unrelated permission mechanism"
Good analysis.
This is a result of trying to retrofit a series of tighter security measures on top of a system that was not originally designed for them, in a way that is both understandable to users but also doesn't break back-compat with APIs (and therefore a lot of existing third-party apps that are seldom updated) too badly. I'm not saying Apple did a perfect job here, but it's a hard problem.
Yes, the problem could probably be "solved" by adding more UI, but "more UI" is not always a good solution. The more UI that exists, the less likely the user is to successfully navigate it. On the other hand, adding additional complexity to an existing UI is also fraught with potential for new bugs and edge cases. Again, not defending the status quo, but I can see how it might have ended up like this.
This is worth spending more time on trying to improve, and perhaps it is reasonable to expect better from an almost-$4tn company. But at the same time, a potential solution is far from easy or obvious, and there is a risk of making things worse if not done with an extreme level of thought and consideration.
(Alternate pessimistic take: A large number of users don't care or read anything, they just click "allow" on anything that gets in their way. A smaller set of users are terrified and disgusted by repeated invasions of the privacy and click "deny" on everything. None of these implementations are doing any good for either group. The allow/deny design pattern is badly broken and in need of rethinking.)
Not quite. The steps are revoking permission in the UI (which works as expected), then implicitly granting permission in a way that the UI does not reflect but quietly persists.
TFA intro (emphasis mine):
> In this Friday’s magic demonstration, I’m going to show how what you see in Privacy & Security settings can be misleading, when it tells you that an app doesn’t have access to a protected folder, but it really does.
One might expect macOS to recognize “you selected a folder that’s already got a UI associated with it” and to wire this up on the backend through the UI rather than creating a simple path exception that leaves the UI nonfunctional. I would have just filed a feedback report about it; but, the outrage-framing of that is, in historical context for this particular site, normal. They have posted extensively about Gatekeeper and TCC issues and seem to encounter them rather more reliably than others do, and released various tools (including today’s!) to support debugging, so certainly I empathize!
It’s really poorly written. After reading it all I still can’t figure out what’s the mechanism by which revoked permissions are hanging around, which is what would actually be interesting here.
My impression is that the revoked permissions do not persist. Rather, an interactive window running under the user’s name has implied access to the user’s home folders, regardless of what’s been set under “Files & Folders” (which still applies for background/non-interactive processes).
I could absolutely be missing something here, but the title would be accurate in saying, “MacOS ACLs aren’t terribly intuitive”. But I think the behavior they’re documenting is intended behavior.
So the title should be something more like "macOS apps retain access to folders after access is removed by the user".
Nope. The user is not revoking the access that they granted. They are revoking general access to a folder, but since there is no way to revoke specific access nothing happens.
Its both. They can never revoke access to a folder they opened, and aren't notified that the app has permanent access.
But also, once they've explicitly granted access, and then implicitly granted access to the same folder, disabling explicit access changes nothing.
That's the beauty of using a GUI-first operating system!
> only way you can protect your Documents folder from access by Insent is to run the following command in Terminal: tccutil reset All co.eclecticlight.Insent then restart your Mac
Jobs is turning in his grave. There are lots of stories of this conflict at NeXT and Mac OS X where there's a quick fix but not via GUI, which was one of the many things that incensed him.
Is there a common source/collection of such stories?
I'm sure there are some great ones, but it was 5-10 years ago when I last read one, and it was fantastic. It's nearly impossible to do a web search for it right now, probably because of Google's bias towards recency. I know it's been linked on Hacker News many times, so maybe somebody else has better info here.
Even if you're not an Apple fan, these sorts of stories are kind of great for learning about product development and companies in general, I think. jwz's stories of Netscape are also phenomenal. (Just don't click on any HN links that go to jwz.org, or you'll have to clear cookies to see any content there in the future. He's not a fan of the exploitation that startups frequently do to their employees and views HN as a primary channel of promoting that exploitation.)
Speaking of GUI weirdness, I've seen a couple of relatively newer macbooks do this thing where the laptop is shutdown with wifi disabled, but after login on startup the wifi icon displays the wifi scanning mode as if the wifi is enabled and looking for networks before reverting to the wifi disabled display icon.
Is this a GUI bug or is the wifi disabled setting overrided for a split second on startup? I haven't looked into it, but the latter would be extremely concerning.
Eye-opening findings. After reading the article I revoked every folder permission and tested: Insent still reads Documents even when the UI shows "None". This is a serious trust failure; transparency is supposed to be the whole point of those preference panes.
Don’t applications running under your user account have access to your user’s home folder by default?
No. You get prompted something like “Application wants access to your Documents folder” and “Application wants access to your Downloads folder” on first attempt of each folder.
Is this a bug, security vulnerability, or just an oversight? It’s not clear to me.
As a precaution would it be a good idea to run that reset command for all apps?
The problem with Mac’s sandbox system is that it’s giving me some PTSD of Windows UAC. It’s inventing a solution to a problem that might exist in small doses, but instead gives users permission fatigue.
I personally think the traditional *nix model has served us quite well, and elective sandboxing using containers (à la Docker and so on) is quite good. The Mac sandbox model is probably ok for most normal users, but for power users is infuriating at times. Multiple restarts of Mac and various processes (and when you realize not enough scopes have been granted, another subsequent restart). I think Mac forcing all users into its sandbox system has been one of my least favorite impacts since upgrading macOS, leading to the enshittification of macOS.
The craziest thing is background processes started by Terminal/iTerm (such as tmux) can inherit Terminal or iTerm’s elevated status even when Terminal or iTerm are no longer running, dead, or killed. So you’ll have a bunch of elevated processes without the elevated parent or grandparent process running—it makes me feel the whole permissions scheme is more performative than actually useful.
I think the bigger issue is that way too many devs still live in the extremely dated paradigm of “anything has access to everything all the time”, even though this model has repeatedly proven itself unworkable (particularly for anybody using proprietary software, which is notorious for sticking its fingers in places it has no business touching).
The way macOS handles permissions with user prompts might be the wrong UX, but giving every program carte blanche by default is definitely not the answer either.
It’s dangerous, particularly for those of us who are developing and publishing software that’s used by many thousands of people — we’re juicy targets and every time we disable protections in the name of convenience and carelessly run random third party software with unfettered access we’re playing with fire. I find myself consistently stunned by the flippant attitude SWEs take towards securing their systems. Our confidence that we’re too smart to fall victim is entirely misplaced.
Someone at Apple should watch some of their old ads.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CwoluNRSSc
I feel the opposite with Mac permissions (or Linux or Windows). Hardly anything asks me, and it seems like everything has access to everything. But same conclusion here, if I don't trust something, I want to explicitly sandbox it.
Note that this isn't "Mac's sandbox system", it's TCC. That's an important distinction to make, because apps that have opted into the proper App Sandbox can't do this... they don't even have the ability to display a prompt for direct access to Documents/.
With the App Sandbox, sandbox extensions are issues whenever you open a file using the file picker. They only last until the app is restarted.
A caveat is that you can save "Security Scoped bookmarks" (basically a signed base64 blob [1]) and pass that around to preserve access, but that isn't very common.
[1] https://www.mothersruin.com/software/Archaeology/reverse/boo...
Yes, TCC is what I meant, but my understanding is TCC is a platform wide sandboxing system?
TCC is a leaky shoot at limiting non-sandboxed apps permissions. The actual macOS sandbox is a different thing.
I would say that TCC is working as intended, unfortunately, with many obscure behaviors to avoid breaking existing apps.
It's even more unfortunate that a lot of apps that could be easily sandboxed aren't.
I feel like I can mostly use containers on macOS. Is there a different sense that people are using containers on *nix? Or are you referring to all the macOS specific software footguns?
I would like to be able to run arbitrary code with gradual/granular privilege escalation. (e.g iOS/android with more affordances and escape hatches. macOS is getting there, but it's been a pretty bumpy/potholed road). Right now if I download a random github repo, I'd put it in a docker container and give it ports/volumes/etc.
I was building a lightweight imitation of OpenClaw. Just a Claude.md and iMessage watcher. I had to play around with Privacy a lot to be able to read my iMessages database, and do a lot of iTerm restarting.
I remember it being worse a while ago. But most of the time I can drag a binary into Settings->Privacy & Security->Full Disk Access or other things (Accessibility API). Maybe other issues come up.
I feel like it should still be much easier, but the general sandboxing model seems directionally functional. (My understanding is containerization isn't a silver bullet security-wise, still requires fiddling, and would be a resource hog ram-wise if not CPU?)
I wish I could pick a parent folder/file and get a box to control everything (network/disk/folders/peripherals/accessibility).
performative is right. files & folders says blocked. open panel access still works. the pane only knows about one path
Plus, Apple exempt their own apps from a bunch of these permissions (because it would be an unacceptable user experience for their customers)
TCC is a different thing. Sandboxed apps work differently and won't need those TCC dialogs.
One of the worst cases happens immediately after logging into a fresh Mac, or after upgrading one. You’re instantly hit with a barrage of requests from all the installed apps and their various permissions. It makes for such a terrible initial user experience, it’s utterly baffling someone at Apple has signed it off. They used to poke fun at Windows in their ads, but UAC has never been that terrible in my experience.
Very much agree. In fact I don't remember Vista or UAC being as unreliable as the Mac now is.
There's another "security UI" issue in the latest macOS, that's been there for at least a few versions.
I go into "Privacy & Security", "Full Disk Access". A bunch of apps added themselves in there (Anki, Fission, Microsoft Autoupdate, WhatsApp), the toggle is disabled and I've never enabled it. Ok, whatever.
But when I go into "Files & Folders", and under those apps I see "Full Disk Access" in gray. Apps that have Full Disk Access toggled on look identical, with "Full Disk Access" in gray. What the hell am I supposed to make of that?
Is it a bug? Do they have full disk access? Is the UI trying to imply that those apps are solely controlled by the FullDisk toggle and are ineligible to request granular permissions for Desktop/Documents? Or that they are eligible, but haven't requested it? Or maybe they did request it, and I granted it, but I don't get to see it? Who knows?
A few notes after testing extensively:
1) This is a crazy macOS bug!
2) The suggestion in the article to do tccutil reset All co.eclecticlight.Insent and reboot didn't actually work for me. However, I did first delete the Insent listing in Privacy & Security System Settings, which could have made a difference?
3) A plaintext search of the whole Tahoe volume from another volume with SIP disabled failed to reveal where this persistent access is stored. It's definitely not in the standard TCC.db files. Perhaps the permission is encrypted somewhere?
4) The article comments suggested that the com.apple.macl extended attribute is the cause, but it's not. Removing all macl attributes makes no difference.
5) The access appears to be to the whole Documents folder rather than any specific file in the folder. If I have multiple files in the folder, the Insent app will sometimes show the contents of one file and sometimes the contents of another.
Doesn’t seem like a bug to me - it’s just a poor UI. Two different security systems both working properly but only one has a UI to show the protections.
Why would you think it's "working properly"?
The app somehow gained a permanent permission that I didn't give and that I can't remove no matter what I do. That's not working properly in any sense.
is this is why apple pushed an update yestersay?
What is the arcane Terminal command to undo this access?
linux and unix before it has been a pretty consistent interface for decades, especially since the introduction of X windows in the 1980's..
I guess yes
The first thing I wondered after reading this article is whether there might be a scheduled task to run the permission reset similarly to how the author ran it via the command line.
It seems most likely that this is some kind of bug where that command or its underlying actions should be called every time the user unchecks something in the settings panel.
This is what we get when the iPhone’s permission system is grafted on top of a desktop OS that was never designed for it. I think they could have done something that is more Unix-like and yet friendly to the GUI end user.
This reminds me of the early days of MacOS where "repair permissions" was the magic fix to everything, or so it was rumored.
Whoa you are bringing back some memories.
And it absolutely was a magic fix. I stand by it.
Safari is snappier now
I never trust american and Chinese companies
It seems that author basically found a 0day and published it. It's for sure better than selling it on the dark web but maybe it's better first tell it to Apple?
Not exactly. It's not a "new" attack vector, any software which was malicious would have already been able to attack when you first gave it permission (a prerequisite for this sticky permission issue). If you had downloaded an app and discovered it was malicious the remedy would generally be to uninstall the app, not just "revoke the permission for the one folder".
It's not a good look for Apple, and it's not great that the permission revocation basically doesn't actually work, but any malware that could have infected the system due to this issue would have also been able to infect the system while the permission was still (intentionally) enabled.
> If you had downloaded an app and discovered it was malicious the remedy would generally be to uninstall the app
There are many apps that themselves are not malicious but they run untrusted code via plugins and stuff. Like VS Code for example.
So you gave it a permission and then revoked it thinking all is fine. tomorrow an extension was hijacked and it now reads your files. cool?
Apple Security would instantly close it as "don't see the problem here" if you reported it to them. They have a poor reputation around TCC bug reports.
That makes it OK for you to not responsibly disclose a vuln? Cool I guess)
I have nothing to do with any of this.
But since they don't consider these as vulnerabilities in the first place, then yeah, sure.
Not really, just an unintuitive security feature. You still need the user's permission to access that folder, but that permission is then persistent. I consider it a UX bug for sure but not an exploit.
I agree, it's a ui/ux problem. It would seem that using the open file dialog should also request access but I'm guessing that was too intrusive and the user action is seen as implicit authorization. Security is one of those things that should aways be explicit though.
can you trust vpn to run well on a mac tho. like mullvad or something good.
imo, you can't really ever fully trust a closed-source system, which is why I advocate for linux distros, even though I'm a mac user myself (for now)
VPN should be properly implemented though as you're able to verify network requests on your own and don't necessarily have to trust apple. Best guarantee is to have a VPN at router level that can't be circumvented by anything (+ a trusted router vendor)
Yeah, they run fine.
This is a few years old, but at one point Apple was happy to bypass VPN or firewall settings to allow their own apps to communicate[1]. I don't know if this is still true on Tahoe, but I wouldn't be surprised if at least the mechanism still exists. So "they run fine", but they may not do what you expect them to do when it comes to Apple's products/services.
[1] https://www.macworld.com/article/675671/apples-own-programs-...
Great insight! Thanks for sharing.
The post misunderstands how the permission system works.
Giving access to a file via the Open and Save panel is an explicit declaration of consent.
Because the panel is provided by OS itself, the app doesn't get access to the item until the user has selected a folder or file through that panel.
No, this is definitely a bug. The Privacy and Security panel is part of Settings, which is definitely part of the OS. Saying the Open and Save panel somehow has priority suggests that the Privacy and Security panel is not looking at the same parameters as the Open and Save panel, ergo a bug.
It’s not a bug and that is clear if you don’t use the documents folder as your example. When granting specific access it is not the same system as when granting general Documents folder access.
The UI just doesn’t reflect this.
> Once you have downloaded Insent
As if that's going to happen.
Well duh, the purpose of Privacy and Security was never Privacy or security. The purpose is to lock you into Apple's ecosystem and prevent you from installing your own software.
This is exactly why the security model matters. If the OS or app can access your data, so can anyone who compromises it. The only real solution is client-side encryption where the server NEVER sees plaintext — your keys stay on your device.
We've been building something in this space — Cifer Security uses ML-KEM (post-quantum) for key encapsulation and Poseidon hashing, with Groth16 proofs for verifiability. The server is intentionally blind to what it's storing.
The macOS permission model is theater if the app itself isn't zero-knowledge. Privacy can't rely on UI toggles — it has to be cryptographic.
Another solution would be for people to make up their minds. Maybe it's time to give up entirely on multi-tasking support in the OS, because what's the point if all interoperability is going to be disabled "for security"? Might as well just go back to running one program at a time and close up all those security holes in one go.
Why everything has to be on the server? ok, Where are you going to store your client authentication tokens or decryption keys. A proper file system isolation is a key if you want a proper application sandboxing
Yet more AI slop on HN
I was considering buying a mini Mac, but there wasn't a way to encrypt it fully with Veracrypt and in the case of Francis Rawls the feds got pass Apples vault encryption. With the recent iPhone notification storage revelation I don't trust Apple at all.
I couldn’t find any reference to File Vault being cracked in the Rawls case. Source?
Edit: I saw they accessed his Mac but they had his password. File Vault 2 wasn’t bypassed, and afaik has never been cracked.
Why crack it when you have silicon level backdoors?
In T2? Source?
Notification storage? What’s the story there?
Nevermind just saw this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716490
I think it is an acceptable quirk for a permission system that has been retrofitted on top of an ecosystem which was not designed with that threat model in mind.
But sure, if I was assigned to make an all-purpose desktop operating system today from scratch, I would likely do this differently, but along with a bunch of other things I think (and the app would have to be implemented differently too).
I never used the ~/Documents folder. Lots of apps just trashed their stuff in there over the years making that folder entirely unusable for my actual document files. I would have to dig through the mess to find them. So I have to admit that I don't really understand the extra "care" Apple is doing to this particular folder. Same for the ~/Downloads folder: all my actual downloads go to some other disk, since the system disk is so small. Protecting this two folders would be entirely useless here.
IMHO where it really needs to be protected from when iCloud suddenly starts grabbing everything w/o the user's permission to upload it to some random Apple servers.