Shortly after the release of macOS Big Sur in 2020, Apple experienced extensive server outages. The outage affected macOS installations, iMessage, Apple Pay, and most importantly, the notarization service. This meant that users had major problems opening apps, revealing a flaw in the way Apple handles app verification on the Mac.
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To illustrate, your Mac performs several checks every time you launch an app. One of these checks is to make sure the app is not malware, and the other is to make sure the developer certificate associated with the app is still valid. These checks are designed to keep users safe and are commonly referred to as app notarization.
Normally, when you use your Mac offline, the checks simply fail and your app launches normally. However, when this server outage occurred, macOS kept trying to check the servers instead of simply crashing. This caused apps to take a painfully long time to launch.
Apple’s promised changes
Following this incident, Apple announced changes to fix the issues, including an option to allow users to opt out of online credentialing checks entirely. The changes should begin rolling out in 2021.
Apple originally announced these improvements because of concerns about whether the company was using the notarization process to collect data about what apps users were using. The company assured that this was not the case and highlighted some changes it planned to make in a support document:
To further protect privacy, we have stopped logging IP addresses associated with Developer ID certificate checks and will ensure that all captured IP addresses are removed from the logs.
In addition, we will be introducing several changes to our security controls over the next year:
- A new encrypted protocol for checking Developer ID certificate revocations
- Strong protection against server failures
- A new preference for users to reject these security measures
Possible rejection of the feature
To Apple’s credit, it has implemented some of the changes it promised, such as stopping the collection of IP addresses and creating a new encrypted protocol for verifying Developer ID certificates.
However, there is no information yet on when the ability to completely disable online notary checks will be released. Moreover, all references to the feature in the support document were completely removed sometime last year.
Developer Jeff Johnson also recently highlighted this situation in his blog.
It seems that Apple has abandoned its plans to allow users to launch apps without any form of online security checks before opening them, which, if true, is a bit of a shame. Although it’s rare, it’s bizarre that apps would suddenly take much longer to launch due to downed servers.
9to5Mac’s opinion
Giving users the option to opt out of authentication would undoubtedly be a huge win for privacy and would counter the notion that their Mac is not really their computer.
Apple has likely made other fundamental changes to macOS to ensure that server outages never prevent apps from launching properly in the future. Regardless, it would be very welcome if the promised opt-out option for notarization was finally released. Apple needs to be clear about its plan here.
H/T: Polar Hacker
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