Why is it any less useful than some entity name? You can be pretty sure that google.com is controlled by Google, and if the domain on the app is g00gle.ru, that's going to fool exactly the same people as if the scammer's company name was Googel.

Because domain names are cheap and can be purchased in bulk.

TLS certificates are for encryption. You don't care if the endpoint is "bad" in some way, only that you are communicating with it securely.

Code signing certificates are to make bans stick. Totally different purpose.

Companies aren't cheap, but they aren't exactly expensive either. A couple weeks ago I've registered a company in Estonia – it only cost me the 265 € state fee. Code signing certificate is another what, 500 euro on top of that? Certainly more expensive than a $10 domain with a free certificate, but still could be a reasonable cost for e. g. a targeted attack.

There's another catch – you either have to register a company in your name, or find somebody to own it for you. I don't think the latter would be a big problem though: there was a lot of news about shady fintech startups in the Baltics lately and many of them were in fact registered in the name of random people looking for some quick cash.

Now, if I see something like MicroSoft-Inc OÜ (EE) in the app signature, I would probably get a bit suspicious. But if it's a less known brand? Who knows!

Sure, but once you start registering companies to run your shady schemes, you're in the process of transforming from a bad bad actor to a legitimate bad actor. Stop trying to steal bank credentials, and switch your spyware to pulling things that help to target ads, "optimize for engagement", or "streamline business", and suddenly the entire system starts working for you. You can then work in the clear, and use all the new security tools - like HSTS, DoH, certificate pinning, and code signing - to prevent your victims from protecting themselves from you.

Yeah and now that person who you paid to register it in your name rats you out to the police. Also, there are a lot of laws you can end up breaking with severe penalties in the course of trying to hide your identity for company registration purposes (it enters the world of anti-money laundering).

It's harder than it sounds, which is why malware authors prefer to steal keys than set up fake companies. Hence the new hardware requirements.

> Yeah and now that person who you paid to register it in your name rats you out to the police.

But they don't know who you are, because you're a scammer who is lying to everyone including them.

> Also, there are a lot of laws you can end up breaking with severe penalties in the course of trying to hide your identity for company registration purposes (it enters the world of anti-money laundering).

So is credit card fraud or CFAA violations, which is the thing this is ostensibly to prevent. Criminals don't follow laws.

> It's harder than it sounds, which is why malware authors prefer to steal keys than set up fake companies. Hence the new hardware requirements.

It's not actually that hard, it's just that stealing keys is really easy. And it's not obvious that the new hardware requirements are going to do any good, because that type of consumer hardware has been consistently riddled with vulnerabilities -- Intel essentially gave up on SGX because they couldn't make it work.

So you're going to find these people anonymously, now? How? You'll have to ask a lot of people before someone agrees to actually set up a fake company for you, you'll also have to find ways to pay them without losing your anonymity, and they will have to explain at some point to the tax authority where this unexpected income came from and what the company they've set up actually does.

If it was that easy to hide your tracks police would never catch criminals, but they do. Every time you increase the complexity of the scheme the chance for mistakes goes up.

> that type of consumer hardware has been consistently riddled with vulnerabilities

USB signing devices aren't really consumer hardware, are they? I don't recall vulns in HSMs being a major source of leaks previously, but I'm sure the game will move there sooner or later.

> Intel essentially gave up on SGX because they couldn't make it work

Intel are selling SGX today, have built new features on top of it, it works fine and all their competitors have been investing heavily into catching up.

>It also significantly reduces the usefulness of code signing for the vast majority

I'd argue that code signing for the average person has zero utility on Windows, and negative utility on macOS.

I really don't think anybody understands or even cares what a certificate means, and the only practical outcome is that sometimes they get scary messages when the app they're installing didn't pay MS for a license.

macOS by default doesn't run unsigned or incorrectly signed apps, period. Only Apple can hand out certificates and certificates are at the very least associated with payment info (though sometimes they want more, DUNS number or whatever). Signed application bundles remove many attack vectors. The primary remaining vectors are:

1. A malicious entity can sign up for a developer account.

2. A non-malicious entity's certificate can be compromised.

(1) does not seem to happen often, if it does happen, Apple can revoke the certificate. They can also increase the burden of proof for creating a developer account if it becomes more common.

(2) happens occasionally. Apple can revoke the key. But in general there is a strong incentive for developers to properly protect their signing keys, because Apple could ban them by not signing their keys in the case of repeated issues.

Code signing substantially increases platform security and as a 16 year macOS user, I would not want to go back to pre-signing days, where you could never be sure whether an application bundle was compromised, unless you'd verify the archive/disk image with GnuPG. But that is opening a big can of worms (WoT, etc.).

> macOS by default doesn't run unsigned or incorrectly signed apps, period.

It kinda depends on what you mean by “default”, but you can always right click an app in Finder and select “open”. When you get the scary “unsigned app” pop-up there will be an extra option there to run it anyway, allowing you to run unsigned binaries without making any settings changes to the os.

That said, I largely agree with the rest of your comment. I do think, as a developer, their stapling stuff is way more onerous than the plain code signing. It basically puts Apple in the position to reject your app in the same way they reject apps in the store, even though there is no store involved.

You only can if you are the admin on your system or enter admin credentials. I don't know, is that still the default?

Maybe? It has never asked for credentials when I do that, but I’ve also never not been an admin on my computer (which is default), so I don’t know.