This was indeed my problem in the original code, too. I placed the autoreleasepool above the loop, not within. Coming back to Objective-C after more than ten years I also appreciate the linked article to memory management as a refresher. As always, your answer is spot on. Thank you very much and have a nice day.

Hello Quinn, Thank you for your reply. In the interim, others have contributed, and my questions have largely been addressed. We do not have a specific issue or use case at the moment; rather, we were seeking clarification on the behavior as it was not entirely clear to us. It is crucial for us to understand the intended behavior of TCC. Following your suggestion to wriker, I ran the above test program in LLDB from the command line. Interestingly, the program can open the file successfully if the binary has FDA, despite neither LLDB nor Terminal having FDA.

Ok, I see. So thanks for the feedback. Valuable, as always :-). The bug report is updated, so I'll keep an eye on the issue.

Hi Quinn, Thanks for the quick response. SecCodeSignatureFlags is a good starting point for the problem I need to solve, as it contains kSecCodeSignatureAdhoc. But currently, I need both CS_ADHOC and CS_SIGNED from cs_blobs.h to determine if a processes binary is signed/ad-hoc signed or not signed. I'm getting this information from ES messages, i.e. from the codesigning flags. So it probably is a good idea to extract those two constants from the header as a work-around and keep an eye on the development of this issue. Or would you recommend against this approach?

Ok, thanks. I filed a bug report with the number FB11958895.

On the other hand, doesn't touch use the utimes function internally? Because I do not get events with eslogger when changing the date via touch (as stated in the OP).

Hi Quinn, the code you posted works fine, the output I get is: {"schema_version":1,"mach_time":567075211518,"event_type":59,"thread":{"thread_id":344982},"version":6,"seq_num":0,"event":{"utimes":{"target":{"path":"\/Users\/sasailic\/test.txt","stat":{"st_blocks":8,"st_blksize":4096,"st_rdev":0,"st_dev":16777232,"st_uid":501,"st_gid":20,"st_ino":14704426,"st_birthtimespec":"1991-12-21T20:12:00.000000000Z","st_flags":64,"st_nlink":1,"st_mtimespec":"2023-01-19T12:57:02.679729000Z","st_ctimespec":"2023-01-19T12:57:02.679759924Z","st_size":11,"st_gen":0,"st_mode":33188,"st_atimespec":"2023-01-19T12:57:03.507743494Z"},"path_truncated":false},"atime":"2023-01-19T12:57:32.692218000Z","mtime":"2023-01-19T12:57:32.692218000Z"}},"time":"2023-01-19T12:57:32.692264799Z","action":{"result":{"result":{"auth":0},"result_type":0}},"process":{"signing_id":"utimes_test","parent_audit_token":{"asid":100006,"pidversion":20612,"ruid":501,"euid":501,"rgid":20,"auid":501,"egid":20,"pid":8304},"codesigning_flags":1912680500,"executable":{"path":"\/Users\/sasailic\/Library\/Developer\/Xcode\/DerivedData\/utimes_test-dfdvixksrrdvdeffdzhdryzpkzlu\/Build\/Products\/Debug\/utimes_test","stat":{"st_blocks":152,"st_blksize":4096,"st_rdev":0,"st_dev":16777232,"st_uid":501,"st_gid":20,"st_ino":14780081,"st_birthtimespec":"2023-01-19T12:56:18.414093520Z","st_flags":0,"st_nlink":1,"st_mtimespec":"2023-01-19T12:56:18.582642868Z","st_ctimespec":"2023-01-19T12:56:18.582709826Z","st_size":77808,"st_gen":0,"st_mode":33261,"st_atimespec":"2023-01-19T12:57:32.687173868Z"},"path_truncated":false},"ppid":8304,"tty":null,"start_time":"2023-01-19T12:57:32.303492Z","is_platform_binary":false,"group_id":8303,"audit_token":{"asid":100006,"pidversion":20610,"ruid":501,"euid":501,"rgid":20,"auid":501,"egid":20,"pid":8303},"is_es_client":false,"responsible_audit_token":{"asid":100006,"pidversion":20610,"ruid":501,"euid":501,"rgid":20,"auid":501,"egid":20,"pid":8303},"session_id":6115,"original_ppid":6115,"cdhash":"E5984AF63EBBFCF8EB6546EDEE7A6F50BACE798C","team_id":"64N35HHH3F"},"action_type":1,"global_seq_num":0} And now I understand where the problem is. I misread the documentation at https://developer.apple.com/documentation/endpointsecurity/es_event_type_t/es_event_type_notify_utimes as if I get a notification when a process changes the modification or access time of a file, not when a process does this using the utime function. That was not clear to me, sorry and thanks for taking the time.

Small update. Suspecting that maybe path muting might be responsible, I tried unmuting a test directory and receiving the mentioned event for this directory with the following additional code: es_invert_muting(client, ES_MUTE_INVERSION_TYPE_TARGET_PATH): es_unmute_all_target_paths(client): es_mute_path(client, "/Users/TestUser", ES_MUTE_PATH_TYPE_TARGET_PREFIX): This did not work either. In the meantime, I also found out that I DO get notifications very seldomly for random apps like, e.g. "/System/Library/CoreServices/Applications/Screen Sharing.app/Contents/MacOS/Screen Sharing". My code should not be the problem, as I do get the same notifications as eslogger.