[mike_hearn]

User isolation works, the keychain isolation works. On macOS tokens stored in the keychain can be made readable only by specific apps, not anything else. It does require a bit of infrastructure - ideally a Mac app that does the release - but nothing you can't vibe code quickly.

[staticassertion]

That's true, but it seems far more complex than just moving trivy to a separate workerflow with no permissions and likely physical isolation between it and a credential. I'm pretty wary of the idea that malware couldn't just privesc - it's pretty trivial to obtain root on a user's laptop. Running as a separate, unprivileged user helps a ton, but again, I'm skeptical of this vs just using a github workflow.

[mike_hearn]

I'm looking for more general solutions. "Properly configure Trivy" is too specific, it's obvious in hindsight but not before.

Privilege escalation on macOS is very hard indeed. Apple have been improving security for a long time, it is far, far ahead of Linux or Windows in this regard. The default experience in Xcode is that a release-mode app you make will be sandboxed, undebuggable, have protected keychain entries other apps can't read, have a protected file space other apps can't read, and its own code will also be read-only to other apps. So apps can't interfere with each other or escalate to each other's privileges even when running as the same UNIX user. And that's the default, you don't have to do anything to get that level of protection.

[staticassertion]

Privesc is trivial on every desktop OS if you run as a regular user. I can write to your rc files so it's game over.

App Store apps are the exception, which is great, but presumably we're not talking about that? If we are, then yeah, app stores solve these problems by making things actually sandboxed.

[mike_hearn]

Any app can be sandboxed on macOS and by default newly created apps are; that's why I say if you create a new app in Xcode then anything run by that app is sandboxed out of the box. App Store enforces it but beyond that isn't involved.

[staticassertion]

I feel like we're just talking about different things? I've just said that I'm aware of apps being sandboxed, that does not mean that some random program you run from your terminal is sandboxed.

[mike_hearn]

Right, I'm skipping a step.

What I'm saying is that it's very easy now to take some arbitrary task - doing a compile/release cycle for example - and quickly knock up a simple signed macOS .app that sandboxes itself and then invokes the release script as a subprocess. Sandboxing is transitive and the .app itself can authenticate to the OS to obtain creds before passing them to the subprocess.

In the past I've thought about making a quick SaaS that does this for people so they don't have to fiddle with it locally and maybe some day I still will. But you can easily do it locally especially with Xcode and AI now. You wouldn't have to know anything about macOS development.