Not with those exact terms, but it is certainly being discussed. Wes McKinney said in a recent talk that with current coding agents there’s no longer an excuse for shipping suboptimal code that takes on tech debt. Writing tests has never been cheaper, writing custom fuzzers, linters, and other harnesses that serve as guardrails has never been cheaper. His take is that “we didn’t have enough engineering time to do it right” is no longer an excuse, and the only excuses left are that you don’t know any better or you have bad taste.
What language that is actually used 40 years after release isn't undergoing big, fundamental changes?
Java? Nope, you're getting a fundamental change in Valhalla
C++? Nope, new language edition every few years with fundamental changes
C? C23 has a number of fairly fundamental changes, expect more in the next language revision
I think your sense of causality is backwards here. These languages are getting fundamental changes because they're being widely used. That is what motivates and drives the change. Languages with no users don't need to change.
As you say, any widely used language gets fundamental changes from time to time.
But most such languages handle much better the compatibility with legacy applications.
Python is the main culprit in most cases when I see conflicts between various software packages that insist to use only a specific version of their dependencies. This is why I have to keep installed many versions of Python, and the Linux distribution that I use must take care to prevent interference between those Python versions.
That's fine, but that's clearly not what I'm talking about.
Languages like F#, Elixir, etc. don't undergo fundamental changes. Yes, every language evolves. But for Python, we're talking about grafting literally fundamental stuff on top of a language not designed for any of these things.
For example, if someone went and redesigned Python to solve its warts, you'd basically end up with F#.
I'd have hoped in 2026 that anyone publishing this type of report would understand that DNSSEC isn't helping anything, and is generally considered to be actively harmful to enable. I'd suggest doing a bit more research and dropping the DNSSEC stuff, or reversing it entirely.
Do you have any reference to the Rust community “not allowing” something? This seems more like a case of a relatively niche tool doing what it needed to do to work, but not (yet) some broader effort to upstream or integrate this into cargo or rustup. I couldn’t find any RFCs or anything, for instance.
How about the boy who called nonsense security vulnerabilities. This is the same author who posts with incredulity that the ability to change a config file with a shell command in it gives you the ability to run the shell command you posted and wants it treated as some big CVE. Absolutely inconceivable that you might already have your harness in a sandbox where this is okay, and inconceivable that anyone might have a threat model that says that someone who can edit configuration of a tool can make that tool do arbitrary things allowed by its config.
MDMs on macOS are permissioned via AccessRights, and you can verify that their permission set is fairly minimal and does not allow what you've described here (bits 0, 4, 10).
That said, their privacy posture at the cornerstone of their claims is snake oil and has gaping holes in it, so I still wouldn't trust it, but it's worth being accurate about how exactly they're messing up.
You are right - the "nonce binding" the paper uses doesn't seem convincing. The missing link is that Apple's attestation doesn't bind app generated keys to a designated requirement, which would be required to create a full remote attestation.
> If you can prove a public key is generated by the SEP of a machine running with all Apple's security systems enabled, then you can trivially extend that to confidential computing because the macOS security architecture allows apps to block external inspection even by the root user.
It only effectively allows this for applications that are in the set of things covered by SIP, but not for any third-party application. There's nothing that will allow you to attest that arbitrary third-party code is running some specific version without being tampered with, you can only attest that the base OS/kernel have not been tampered with. In their specific case, they attempt to patch over that by taking the hash of the binary, but you can simply patch it before it starts.
To do this properly requires a TEE to be available to third-party code for attestation. That's not a thing on macOS today.
I wiped my post because you are right. I don't think it needs a full SGX-style TEE. What's missing is a link to designated requirements. Abusing a nonce field doesn't seem to work, or if it does I can't figure out how. The MDM/MDA infrastructure would need to be able to include:
public key from SEP -> designated requirement of owning app binary
The macOS KeyStore infrastructure does track this which is why I thought it'd work. But the paper doesn't mention being able to get this data server side anywhere. Instead there's this nonce hack.
It's odd that the paper considers so many angles including things like RDMA over Thunderbolt, but not the binding between platform key and app key.
Reading the paper again carefully I get the feeling the author knows or believes something that isn't fully elaborated in the text. He recognizes that this linkage problem exists, proposes a solution and offers a security argument for it. I just can't understand the argument. It appears APNS plays a role (apple push notification service) and maybe this is where app binding happens but the author seems to assume a fluency in Apple infrastructure that I currently lack.
I can buy the idea that if you can have the MDM infrastructure attest the code signing identity through the designated requirements, that you can probably come pretty close, but I'm still not quite sure you get there with root on macOS (and I suspect that this is part of why DCAppAttest hasn't made it to macOS yet).
Certainly, it still doesn't get you there with their current implementation, as the attempts at blocking the debugger like PT_DENY_ATTACH are runtime syscalls, so you've got a race window where you can attach still. Maybe it gets you there with hardened runtime? I'd have to think a bit harder on that.
Yeah I didn't quite understand the need for PT_DENY_ATTACH. Hardened runtime apps that don't include get-task-allow are already protected from debugger attach from the start of the process, unless I misunderstood something.
I'm not quite sure why Apple haven't enabled DCAppAttest on macOS. From my understanding of the architecture, they have every piece needed. It's possible that they just don't trust the Mac platform enough to sign off on assertions about it, because it's a lot more open so it's harder to defend. And perhaps they feel the reputational risk isn't worth it, as people would generalize from a break of App Attest on macOS to App Attest on iOS where the money is. Hard to say.
Looking at their paper at [1], there's a gaping hole: there's no actual way to verify the contents of the running binaries. The binary hash they include in their signatures is self-reported, and can be modified. That's simply game over.
A note, as others have posted on this thread: I mention this as a concrete and trivial flaw in their whole strategy, but the issue is fundamental: there's no hardware enclave for third-party code available to do the type of attestation that would be necessary. Any software approach they develop will ultimately fall to that hole.
That idea was not expressed in the article, only the fact that the ads were removed. This is worth covering, especially when coupled with the context for what ads Meta regularly does allow. One does not have to believe that they're obligated to do so while also believing that it's incredibly scummy behavior that consumers should be aware of and question.
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