[asveikau]

I don't fully understand the difference. But signed is different from notarized. Notarized means you uploaded the binary to Apple. Previously, you can sign without doing that.

I haven't looked enough to understand what is gained by notary. Does Apple want to search your binary for maliciousness or rulebreaking (potentially even at a later date) so that it might revoke the notarization/signature?

[pjmlp]

In order to avoid repeating myself, from WWDC 2019:

"Advances in macOS Security"

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/701/

"All About Notarization"

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/703

[asveikau]

Thanks.

Some of this stuff seems a tad disingenuous. Like preventing debugging. The debugger APIs on Mac already pop up a password prompt, limiting the usability in malware (and actual use, like trying to debug over ssh). Meanwhile, a culture of producing separate binaries for debug and for end users (debug builds lacking optimization, allowing additional permissions) is in my experience a great way to fail to reproduce legit customer-facing bugs during development and have greater difficulty diagnosing them when they occur on a real live user machine.

[saagarjha]

As far as I understand, notarization is intended to catch malware before it can be distributed. The traditional signing mechanism can protect users against malicious software because Apple can pull certificates used to sign malware.