In particular, network extensions, which need to be installed/activated by the containing app. I'm not particularly great at GUI stuff, so maybe there's a way one can simulate/automate that part? I'm assuming CI testing, presumably done with VMs being created on the fly to build & test. (I admit a historical failure on unit testing for my code, but most of that has historically been kernel code. I'm trying to do better!) I again apologise for my obvious ignorance at some of this.

This is for a non-GUI program -- intended to be a LaunchDaemon at some point; I followed Quinn's instructions for this. As I've commented before, I'm using cmake to generate an xcodeproj (wheeeee), so I wouldn't be surprised if it's doing something wrong. I get the error if I use open Debug/HelperDaemon.app or try to run it in Xcode. That doesn't quite surprise me a lot (again, not a GUI app), and Xcode says there may be a problem with signing. If I run it via the command line (that is, ./Debu/HelperDaemon.app/Contents/MacOS/HelperDaemon), it is immediately killed. I haven't been able to find much in the logs. What I have noted is that if I do codesign --force --deep --sign - ./Debug/HelperDaemon.app, it then does work (although then I run into other crashes). However, doing codesign -vv Debug/HelperDaemon.app, it says everything is fine. (codesign -dv --entitlements :- Debug/HelperDaemon.app shows the entitlements I expect, as well.) This is on macOS; I'm building on and for 11.6, using Xcode 13.1. For the program's entitlements, I've got com.apple.developer.system-extension.install, keychain-access-groups, and com.apple.security.application-groups (although I tried removing that one, with no difference in behaviour).

NEFlowMetaData has sourceAppSigningIdentifier -- but that doesn't have to be the bundle identifier, correct? So is there a way to go from one to the other? (Ideally bidirectionally -- if I can find a bundle, how would I find the signing identifier?)

The NSWorkspace method that does this, fullPathForApplication, is deprecated. So what's the alternative? I do note that oascript can do it by id of app "App Name", so unless that's going away too, there must be some way of doing it, no?

I had assumed the answer was "copy or create a plist in /Library/LaunchDaemons," but after poking around here and google a bit, I'm more confused. (Which seems to be a normal thing for me, so I'll hold off deciding I'm stupid for a while.) The options that I seem to see are: Copy/create a plist in /Library/LaunchDaemons Have Foo.app/Contents/Library/LaunchAgents, which will, I presume, run something as long as the app is running? Use SMJobBless to install the daemon. This is the preferred way, and requires an embedded launchd plist, which I presume is what will be installedinto /Library/LaunchDaemons? And "embedded" means "pushed into the binary because MachO is infinitely versatile so we can do this if we want to"? This requires user interaction to get an authorization? And... if the app is distributed via MDM, then that can install the launchd plist file without the app needing to run, just like it can install a system extension without the app needing to run?

A successful installation/activation can either be "yay it's done now!" or "wellllllll you need to reboot first but otherwise it's done yay!" So what determines which of those two happens?

This may be dumb: on an Apple Silicon system, with a system extension that is examining / interfering with some process, one or both of them may be run under Rosetta. So if a helper tool (app, daemon, whatever) tries to get the kSecCodeInfoUnique for an application of a given name... will that be the same one seen by the extension? Or will it depend on whether any part of the triad is running under Rosetta?

We're using CMake here, so we can build on Windows, Linux, and macOS. So now I'm trying to convert from Xcode to CMake (which then generates an xcode project, whee). The main problems I'm running into are figuring out which settings to do via CMakeLists.txt. That's mostly tiresome. But theres a new issue, and I don't know enough about CMake to figure it out: compiling my .swift file generates a ${PROJECT}-Swift.h file, which is used by the ObjC files. Which is great. Except I don't know how to tell CMake about that. (And I haven't figured out what variable describes where Xcode puts it, but that's more of a tiresome issue than head-against-desk issue...) Has anyone run into and hopefully figured this out?

The layout I'm looking at: • A daemon which queries various things, and at times decides it's time to log in (or log back in) • An application that handles the logging in, configuration, etc., which registers a custom url scheme • A LaunchAgent which would get an XPC (or just mach message, I suppose) from the daemon, and sends an open-url request for the custom url scheme, eg x-kithrup:login?reason=ihateyou All of that is pretty straightforward to me! But... on a mac, can I tell who sent the request? That is, can my application see that it was my LaunchAgent that made the open-url request? On iOS, it looks like I can, as the UIApplicationDelegate has a method that passes in a sourceApplication. But the NSAppleEventDescriptors confused me a lot.

I'm trying to get the URL used to launch an application. (Quinn helped me do the other part of this -- getting information about who sent the event -- in a TSI.) In the will-finish-launching method in the app delegate, I do:         eventManager.setEventHandler(self, andSelector: #selector(handleGetURLEvent(_:withReplyEvent:)), forEventClass: AEEventClass(kInternetEventClass), andEventID: AEEventID(kAEGetURL)) And that does work: it launches the application if it's not running, and switches over to it if it is running. But... when I try to use keyDirectObject to get the URL it doesn't work -- I get nil as the result. But if I iterate through the event's items... I find the item.         #if false         let url = event.attributeDescriptor(forKeyword: keyDirectObject)         print(url)         #else         let count = event.numberOfItems         print("\(count) items")         for index in 1...count {             let keyword = event.keywordForDescriptor(at: index)             if keyword == keyDirectObject {                 if let d = event.atIndex(index), let str = d.stringValue {                     url = URL(string: str)                     break                 }             }         }         #endif Later on (and this was due to Quinn), I have         guard let aeAuditToken = event.attributeDescriptor(forKeyword: keySenderAuditTokenAttr) and that works, so I don't think I'm asking for the URL incorrectly. Any ideas?

The main question I have, honestly, is how do I do that? Or what do I do? The goal, of course, is to allow IT to deploy our product to macs. Our product has a network system extension, and the ability to install without asking user permission is very attractive. But... I'm not sure how to get started! My software-trained mind thinks that I should be able to write up my own provisioning file, but then I read the specifications and the part of my mind that keeps me from doing too many stupid things starts kicking the other part below the table. Is there a good resource for this from a developer's perspective? A tool that can create sample files for me, or documentation that can tell me what files and information I need to provide to someone using, say, JAMF?

I'm specifically thinking about a transparent proxy provider, since that's what we're using, so what happens if: Process /Applications/Foo.app/Contents/MacOS/Foo opens a connection to, say, google port 443 After getting the connection set up, it then fork&execs /bin/sh (or whatever 😄). Does a new flow get created? Or does it continue to use the existing one?

Consider: sef% mdfind 'kMDItemDisplayName =[c] "Zoom.us"' sef% sef% mdfind 'kMDItemDisplayName =[c] "zoom.us"' sef% vs sef% mdfind 'kMDItemDisplayName == "zoom.us"' /Applications/zoom.us.app (Using '==' vs '=' doesn't seem to make a difference.)

I have several executables, and I want them to be able to trust each other, since they grew up together and have had many bonding adventures together. When getting an XPC (or AppleEvents, thank you Quinn 😄) from another process, is there an easy way to find out if the other process is signed the same way the receiving process is? The code signing identity is easy to check, but of course it's also pretty easy to forge. (So this would be a variant, I think, of a question I asked a few months ago, how to see if a process is "properly" signed [which, as I said then, means it's got a valid code signature, and that is anchored "properly," which is to say something that would pass gatekeeper]. Only easier, because I really just want to say "here is my SecCode, here is this other process', are they both comparable?) Although I guess another thing would be to see if they're both in the same app group?

I've finally been installing our bundle into /Applications, and have noticed that this causes a crash report dialogue to come up whenever one of the components crashes. Which, at this point, is still fairly often (that's what asserts in debug builds are for!). But I really don't want to keep manually dismissing those windows; is there a way to stop them from coming up? (I mean, I still want the crash reports created and logged, but I have my own scripts that go through there to get new ones and cleanup the old ones.)