[AnthonyMouse]

There is a simple and highly accurate heuristic to tell if a security measure is reasonable:

Is it an open standard that anyone can permissionlessly implement?

When the answer is yes, there is a high probability that it's something reasonable, e.g. TOTP.

When the answer is no, what you will find behind the curtain is either a fool or a crook.

[TeMPOraL]

This heuristic is not covering the dimensions of interest here, because it fails to address the key security questions (that the industry usually wants people to not even think about):

Who is doing the securing, whose interests are being secured, and against who/what?

Security isn't an unqualified good thing to have. It's just an instrument of control. Who wields it and how are the paramount questions. You can have an "open standard that anyone can permissionlessly implement", aimed at protecting interest of third parties, by securing the device from its actual owner. In fact, that describes many, if not most, security measures introduced in computing over the past 20 years, especially on the web and mobile devices.

[AnthonyMouse]

> You can have an "open standard that anyone can permissionlessly implement", aimed at protecting interest of third parties, by securing the device from its actual owner.

Except that you can't, because those systems require the device to come with secret keys, so an interoperable third party implementation would require keys, which requires permission, which is the exact thing "permissionless" is intended to evict.

[Terr_]

Right, and that leads us back to the more-generalized (but very classic) cui bono? Who gets the benefits?

[fragmede]

In Apple's case, I don't know. I'm making macOS software, and the number of roadblocks I keep running into in the name of security is past merely annoying, it's costing real time and money to deal with it. Unfortunately that's where the users are so we have to spend the resources on it so it's an Apple tax on doing things on their platform. We have to spend more money on Apple development, so that ecosystem benefits? idk.

[spjt]

Yeah we were trying to develop an internal corporate MacOS desktop app and the amount of shit I had to go through just to get it to the point where someone who isn't a developer was able to run it was absolutely insane. In the end a lot of this is probably even counterproductive as people get used to these sort of things coming with instructions to disable all security and paste these sudo commands into a terminal to get it running...

[AnthonyMouse]

It has been a known thing in security for what has to be decades now that taking a security/usability trade off in favor of "security" is the fast way to train users to mash the "allow all" button from muscle memory, thereby severely impairing security.

The premise of the scary banner has to be that the first time the user has ever seen it is when there is actually something wrong.

This is, of course, fully incompatible with the corporate incentive to present the scary banner whenever an honest third party hasn't paid them the danegeld or satisfied a bureaucratic process documented by Franz Kafka. If the thing you care about is actually security.