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Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

I once sent an email to Steve Jobs back in 2009 or so

I told him that the MacOS permissions dialog could easily be spoofed, and that Macs should have a secret phrase or icon that you choose that they’d display inside these dialogs, and prevent their screen capture like what they had been doing with their recent DRM features.

Never heard back from him

And it never got implemented. Any program can still continue to spoof it and grab your system password.

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I mean, at that point and app could just put up a fake prompt using the UI framework. And I think users would be more hesitant to type a full password than just click a button. But if you're talking about a bug similar to mine where an attacker could use the OS's own code against it and make it show a prompt with misleading content, you might be able to report it to Apple Product Security and maybe get a bounty.

I mean, a website could display a crafty popup-appearing box and try to get you to type in your username and password. Not really sure how you can prevent that.

Vista used the “the background dims quite a bit” to try to deal with that.

Yeah. I think the key thing in my vulnerability is that it abused a legitimate OS prompt and had the consequences of that prompt be applied to something separate from what the prompt text itself said it would.

I just told you how… it would show your special icon or phrase inside so you’d confirm it before you typed anything.

The phrase would be managed through a system screen, like a login screen

Problem is most users will not care or understand it. Someone will spoof the dialog without the special icon or phrase and users would still enter the password.

Banks did this years ago, but a few surveys showed nobody actually checked for their key phrase or image.

I wonder why they don't add a little led to their laptops that would indicate that it really is the system asking for your password. Kind of like the camera led.

That's an interesting idea. I do think it would be nice to have some way of knowing "is this prompt coming from the operating system or some third-party app?". However, I don't think it would have helped in the case of my vulnerability, because it abused a legitimate OS prompt.

When they had the touchbar on the MacBook Pros, they would put the authentication in there since that was something only the OS could take full control over.

That's honestly a pretty smart move.

Yeah it's a shame it's just such an overengineered/expensive thing.

You can draw arbitrary content into it though?

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