[saurik]

I had just noticed, in passing through the open tab to the link you provided, that I had not adequately explained the old iBooks-on-4.2 check. I added some clarification, and then saw that in fact you had noticed the issue now in this reply as well ;P.

It seems that Corona (the iOS 5.0.1 untether), at least, does allow an App Store application to call exec(). I am honestly not certain why that is allowed... I am, however, also not entirely certain whether that is normally disallowed: it might actually not be considered a problem by Apple.

The reason why I point out that there might actually not normally be a restriction against exec() is that I just tested using fork() on my iOS 5.0.1 iPhone 4S using Corona (Absinthe 0.4) and, in fact, you can't call that from an App Store application. (So, the sandbox works. ;P)

To test, I ran Facebook, then used `cycript -p Facebook` to inject a console into that process (using cycript, my JavaScript/Objective-C hybrid shell). I then ran `new Functor(dlsym(RTLD_DEFAULT, "fork"), "v")()` to get a reference to and call the fork system call stub from libSystem (libc).

The sandbox daemon was then asked by the kernel to verify whether that process was allowed to fork, and as it was not I got the following log message and the process was denied. (I say "denied" as it was not killed: it just got -1 from fork() with EPERM.)

Jun 18 15:00:16 Transponder sandboxd[768]: Facebook(759) deny process-fork

Moving on, your comparison to SELinux is, AFAIK, fairly accurate; on Ubuntu, AppArmor is also a similar system to the Apple sandbox (and, transitively, SELinux). It should be pointed out, however, that these systems are also per-process: I can still install things on the computer and mark them "no limits".

As for your other comments, App Store applications on jailbroken devices still cannot snoop into your keychain, mail, or the data stored for other applications such as Facebook. They do have access to your camera roll, but that is true of non-jailbroken devices as well (this is fixed on iOS 6).

Finally, you are correct in that installing a .deb on your system is handing the packager the equivalent of a temporary root shell on your device: in addition to installing arbitrary code with the package (the point of installing it at all), it gets to actually run scripts as root during the (un)installation itself.

[0x0]

Neat! Thanks again for the super-detailed clarifications!

Going back to my comment that started this sub-thread, I guess the point then still stands, "Too bad there's no way to side-load unsigned (or signed by a custom CA) apps while still maintaining the sandbox restrictions." (i.e. no "safe thirdparty appstores") ;)

[quick note on the camera roll thing, I think apps are denied access before the user confirms a location permission popup]

[another quick note on the exec() thing, exec() probably wouldn't work since appstore codesign only works on a single binary. probably related to why only static libraries are allowed, too]

[edit: the fork/exec thing may also be tied in to the strict limitations on background processing for appstore apps? interesting to see your cycript experiment there!]

[saurik]

It would be easy to provide such a thing on top of a jailbroken system, but in practice there are very few use cases for it: Apple's curation is only evil in a small handful of situations. Again: the vast and overwhelming majority of things people jailbreak to do (and even ten pay for in Cydia) are not apps and fundamentally cannot be installed as an app with an icon into a sandbox. It would likely then be a political death blow of that, as opposed to "ability to bypass the sandbox" we're all that was allowed (as explaining to people, even to developers, even to those actively at that minute using them, what substrate extensions are and how they have no similarity to the apps they modify, is sufficiently tricky that the response will just be "we already gave you the ability to side-load apps").

[pooriaazimi]

Please consider posting this whole thread on your blog, or somewhere more accessible/searchable. Lots of interesting stuff that I'm certain have never been stated anywhere in a coherent manner, and would literally rot here, with just a handful people reading them.