[ruthmarx]

> so it's a moot point and needless paranoia.

No it's not. You are misunderstanding my point.

I'm not talking about Apple being able to patch the OS and control everything at that level - of course they can, but it seems unlikely.

I'm talking about a developer framework, a high level abstraction, where the method of resolving would be more likely to be intercepted - consider for example something like that on an iPhone with the justification being safety or 'for the children' or whatever.

That doesn't seem unlikely or improbably at all, and certainly not moot or any kind of paranoia.

[marksomnian]

Assuming arguendo that apple did want to do that kind of messing with DNS though - what's there to stop them from changing getaddrinfo() in the same way? As someone pointed out upthread, if you don't trust your OS vendor to do DNS lookups correctly, your only option is to not usre your OS vendor for DNS lookups, which is in the realm of Byzantine faults.

(And further, assuming arguendo that there was DNS meddling happening but somehow getaddrinfo() was exempt - now the user has one app that behaves differently to all their others, which is worse in every practical sense.)

[ruthmarx]

> Assuming arguendo that apple did want to do that kind of messing with DNS though - what's there to stop them from changing getaddrinfo() in the same way?

Nothing, I already acknowledge they have the power to do rootkity things if they wanted to, but I don't consider that likely.

I do consider it likely they might do that kind of a thing at a framework level and try to push most developers to use it.

> As someone pointed out upthread, if you don't trust your OS vendor to do DNS lookups correctly, your only option is to not usre your OS vendor for DNS lookups, which is in the realm of Byzantine faults.

I responded to that as I'm responding here, by pointing out that isn't relevant to the threat model that I've described.

> now the user has one app that behaves differently to all their others, which is worse in every practical sense.

Not if that app actually gets the user to where they actually wanted to go.