Facebook puts a large "Stop!" warning in the browser console when you try to open developer tools with a link to https://www.facebook.com/selfxss. I'd be really curious to see if that's helped to stop such attacks on their side.
Full text: "This is a browser feature intended for developers. If someone told you to copy-paste something here to enable a Facebook feature or "hack" someone's account, it is a scam and will give them access to your Facebook account."
If Facebook is willing to fool kids into giving up their privacy via side-loading, you can imagine why Apple is nervous about how things would go if anyone could easily do so.
Nah, thats a win2k era cop-out. The hard part is balancing secure by default and granting privs only when absolutely necessary (and authenticated)
I think a better angle is pushing for relaxing software distribution: keep the trust chain but let people run apps in the normal sandbox even if those haven’t gone through the current process. Exploits are still possible, of course, but the normal controls allowing user awareness of the device’s status would be intact.
We know exactly what happens when you do this. Less savvy users will be tricked into installing malware.
For instance, a couple of months ago:
>FlixOnline App Spreads Android Malware by Promising Free Netflix
https://www.thequint.com/tech-and-auto/flixonline-app-spread...
While there are people who make this argument purely on ideological grounds (similar to arguments you hear about individual freedoms vs collective rights), it's essential to recognize that _completely_ removing the ability of independent developers to write and run software if the manufacturer has decided they don't like that developer will slowly destroy the competition, creativity and freedom that created most of the technologies that are used today.
It's reasonable to make the argument that the manufacturer needs to secure the devices that they sell, even for users with low technical literacy.
Advocating for the manufacturers to be given total control over everything that every user can do with their device won't guarantee increased security, but it certainly would result in manufacturers being able to disable any software they chose to, regardless of legitimacy, without reason or recourse.
That's a prospect that is (IMO) far more terrifying than what it could prevent (some users falling for certain types of phishing attacks that install spyware).
I disagree with that conclusion (the latter scenario happens frequently and has lead to significant consequences, including death) but completely agree that it's not a good situation that the alternative is giving a couple of companies control over who gets to ship software. That's why I described it as a market failure — as a user you're left picking which set of drawbacks is less of a problem for you.
What I'd like is basically opening up the App Store walls: allow users to enable third-party stores but everyone runs their apps inside the same sandbox, and the OS vendor retains some global kill switch for malware but with some level of public oversight.
One edge case for this would be the apps which need special permissions: for example, some cell carriers have special entitlements on iOS which allow their apps to talk to their networks in ways which normally are blocked. Reconciling edge cases like that with multiple stores would require care.
We've been in this argument before and the most secure platform today is still the web, an open platform where the code is designed to run on demand.
There's a reason everybody asks to install their native app, there's much more data to gather there than in the web.
I'm not suggesting that the manufacturer should be creating closed platforms to "secure" things for the user; I'm saying that closed platforms can't guarantee an increase in security but will guarantee the slow erosion of openness in all other platforms.
I'm well aware of how native apps are heavily marketed over their web-app equivalents because companies want to gather more data, get access to push notifications (on iOS at least), etc.
The scammers who push malware under the guise of tech support, free porn/games, etc. are effective enough to compromise millions of people and that's before you get to the question of what it'd look like if a government started pushing access for monitoring. How many people might consider installing something which this guy they met in a coffeeshop says will protect their messages from government surveillance? Now consider how many people might have malware installed by an abusive domestic partner, and where control of the device would extend to hiding the existence of spyware.
This is not to say that Apple is acting without self-interest here, only that I think there's really a pretty nasty market failure making it quite difficult to reconcile someone being able to make choices about their device with a fairly high risk of compromise with potentially significant consequences.