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Comment by lathiat | Hacker News Reader

Seems unfortunate that to boot something unsigned you have to disable SIP, e.g. once we have a working linux port (I'm sure it won't be long) to enable booting it will reduce my OSX security at runtime [and not just from the boot chain].

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I was paranoid for a long time about things like SIP and SecureBoot but think of it this way. What is the likelihood that you are infected by a bootkit versus some 0day that affects your browser? My main beef w/ rootless/SIP/Gatekeeper and these types of technology is that you no longer own your hardware, you are a slave to the HW manufacturer.

You know you can disable SIP and Gatekeeper, right? It's just two terminal commands.

Yet at the same time you get roasted on here if you run things as root. It’s pure bs.. Apple has top notch engineering and architecture. Others always follow.. in terms of hardware, but also software

Booting something unsigned would remove the security anyway, wouldn't it?

Some of the Linux distros have signed bootloaders/kernels for SecureBoot on PCs, so it would be good if that same model could be allowed on macs.

Given the state of signed firmware, I think Apple is in the right - https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/07/new-f...

I think that the two are at best tangentially related.

It removes some specific types of security, but System Integrity Protection is a "runtime" protection on OSX. It disables access to various files/etc even as root unless in the right context.

So it seems unfortunate to have to lower the level of runtime security for OSX, in order to enable booting unsigned software. As they shouldn't be strictly related.

My understanding is that if boot security cannot be established, it's impossible to assert runtime security either. Otherwise, a compromised code in the boot process can also alter how SIP behaves, essentially invalidating its security function.

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