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Can one use the new provenance feature to avoid slow notarization checks for newly compiled unsigned binaries?
I am working with a compiler that produces native binaries, It's really meant for servers so it's not integrated with Xcode or the Xcode build system. As such the output binaries get the default ad-hoc signatures the linker makes. After (re)compiling such a binary, there is a delay whilst running it. This is because macOS notices it's an unknown binary and goes off to ask notarization servers/Xprotect if it's known malware. Fine, I understand the need for this and why it happens. From the logs it's clear that macOS is now tracking the "provenance" of binaries. This means where they came from. This raises the question of whether it could know that my local dev binaries are coming from this compiler, if it was in turn properly signed and notarized. And if so, whether there is some security policy I could set to say "if binary X produces binary Y, then trust Y". Yes I know this would be a security exploit if it were done that way by default, but I am willing to take the risk of special malware that compiles itself first using this special compiler that isn't installed by default then runs the output, as presumably any such malware would be so targeted Xprotect/notarization wouldn't know about it anyway. The provenance mechanism is some internal security thing and isn't documented, but I'm curious if anyone knows more about it and whether it's usable for this? Or alternatively if there's a way to stop macOS doing these slow checks for certain binaries e.g. under specific paths?
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Jun ’24