Apple might completely take over end users' computers (2020)
How Apple might completely take over end users' computers

Many people are concerned about Apple's ongoing attempts to take more and more control of end user machines from their users. Some go so far as to say that Apple won't be happy until they have absolute and total control over all programs running on end user devices, presumably so that they can enforce their 30% tax on every piece of software. Whether this is true or not we don't really know.What we can do instead is a thought experiment. If that was their end goal, how would they achieve it? What steps would they take to obtain this absolute control? Let's speculate.Web appsA common plan against tightening app store requirements is to provide a web app instead. You can do a lot of cool things with WebAssembly and its state is continuously improving. Thus it must be blocked. This is trivial: require that web browsers may only run WASM programs that are notarized by Apple. This is an easy change to sell, all it needs is a single tear jerking please-think-of-the-children presentation about the horrible dangers of online predators, Bitcoin miners and the like. Notarization adds security and who wouldn't want to have more of that?There is stilll the problem that you can run an alternative browser like Chrome or Firefox. This can be solved simply by adding a requirement that third party browsers can only get notarized if they block all non-notarized web apps. On iOS this is of course already handled by mandating that all browsers must use the system's browser engine. At some point this might get brought over to macOS as well. For security.JavascriptBlocking WASM still leaves the problem of Javascript. There is a lot of it and even Apple can not completely block non-notarized JS from running. Here you have to run the long game. An important step is, surprisingly, to drive the adoption of WebAssembly. There are many ways of doing this, the simplest is to stop adding any new JS functionality and APIs that can instead be done in WebAssembly. This forces app developers to either drop Apple support or switch to WASM. This transition can be boosted by stopping all development and maintenance on the existing JS engine and letting it bitrot. Old web pages will get worse and worse over time and since Apple won't fix their browser, site operators will be forced to upgrade to technologies like WASM that come with mandatory notarization. For security.Scripting languagesScripting languages such as Perl and Python can be used to run arbitrary programs so they must go. First they are removed from the core install so people have to download and install them separately. That is only an inconvenience, though. To achieve total control notarization requirements must again be updated. Any program that loads "external code" must add a check that the code it is running is notarized by Apple. At first you will of course allow locally written script files to be run, as long as you first hunt through system security settings to add run permissions to the script file. This must be done with physical human interaction like a mouse or touchpad. It must not be automatable to prevent exploits. The obtained permissions are of course revoked every time the file is edited. For security.CompilersThere is still a major hole in this scheme: native compilers. It might be tedious, but it is possible to compile even something as big as Firefox from scratch and run the result. Therefore this must be blocked, and notarization is again the key. This can be done by requiring all binaries, even self-built ones, to be notarized. This is again easy to sell, because it blocks a certain class malware injection attacks. Following iOS's lead you have to get a developer certificate from Apple to sign your own code to run on your own machine.Once the basic scheme is in place you have to tighten security and block the signing from any compiler except the Apple provided system one. This has to be done for security, because existing third party compilers may have bugs and features that could be used to circumvent notarization requirements somehow. Only Apple can get this right as the system provider. There must be one, and only one, way of going from source code to executable binaries and that path must be fully controlled by Apple. For security.Total separation of development and useEven with all this you can still compile and run your own code, meaning people will find ways of getting around these requirements and doing what they want to do rather than what Apple permits them to do. This means that even tighter reins are required. The logical end result is to split the macOS platform into two separate entities. The first one is the "end user" system that can only run Apple-notarized apps and nothing else. The second is the "dev platform" that runs only XCode, Safari (in some sort of a restricted mode) and one other program that has to have been fully compiled on the current physical machine. Remote compilation servers are forbidden as they are a security risk. This is roughly how iOS development and things like game console dev kits already work. The precedent is there, waiting for the final logical step to be taken.This has the side effect that every developer who wants to support Apple platforms now has to buy two different Apple laptops, one for development and one for testing. But let us be absolutely clear about one thing. This is not done to increase sales and thus profits. No. Not under any circumstances! It is for a higher purpose: for security.

