Comments on: “Disabling” Launch Services File Quarantine

By: ∞ Infinite Mac » Blog Archive » “Disabling” Launch Services File Quarantine

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 18:14:24 +0000

[...] by R0GUE on March 26th, 2008 in Mac OS X | The Apple Blog has a very informative piece regarding the open confirmation dialog in Leopard that pops up when you attempt to access a [...]

By: Bob Rudis

Bob Rudis — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 14:56:07 +0000

@John: I never said (I actually contraindicated using any of this in the post) this was a good idea

By: Sean

Sean — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 07:12:32 +0000

Whoops, that’s using the ACP.

find . -print0 | xargs -0 xattr -d com.apple.quarantine

By: Sean

Sean — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 07:05:01 +0000

Apple’s answer to Oompa is a nag prompt? Hilarious.

Anyway, when you get tired of the nagging:

find . -print0 | xargs -0 ~/Applications/etc/xabatch ~/Applications/etc/com.apple.xabatch {}

By: Nectar

Nectar — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 16:58:59 +0000

Note for those disabling quarantine:
The purpose of this functionality is one last line of defense against trojans such as OSX.Leap.A.. If you disable quarantine, you will get no warning if you download an item that appears to be an image or PDF but is actually a malicious application.

By: John

John — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 05:27:45 +0000

make sure that the file is valid xml and then you need to log out and log back in.

Although, honestly, .executable, .bundle and .application-file make for a very unwise set up.

By: Michel Fortin

Michel Fortin — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 03:58:13 +0000

There is a list of applications whose files are automatically quarentained by the system. Take a look at: /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Resources/Exceptions.plist

Obviously, this does not prevent applications from quarantining themselves (as Safari does).

By: Bob Rudis

Bob Rudis — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 21:37:23 +0000

@John: I’ve created the “com.apple.DownloadAssessment.plist” file and added:

public.disk-image
public.archive
public.item
public.content
public.data
public.executable
com.apple.bundle
com.apple.application-file

to it and re-started Safari and download dmgs and still receive the “are you sure” dialog from Launch Services. This can definitely be me missing something, tho. Anything else I need to do?

By: John

John — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 20:39:19 +0000

Apple provides the mechanism to exclude files from being quarantined by file type. Read this article about it:

http://mymacinations.com/2008/02/06/changing-the-systems-default-settings-for-html-files-safe/

By: Bob Rudis

Bob Rudis — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 20:22:20 +0000

@Dan: the script should be pretty easy to tweak. If you really want that option, let me know mailto: first @ last . net

@Justin: Very cool. Really good info. As I’ve said when working with Microsoft devs w/r/t code-signing: I just hope development teams have a good way to handle this so that keys don’t make it out of their control w/o knowing. Code-signing apps is not as simple as it sounds when you factor in employees leaving and how you integrate it into your build processes.

By: Justin

Justin — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 20:01:07 +0000

It’s probably worth noting that at least for Cocoa apps, if the developer code signs the application, this prompt is avoided, as is the one about giving access to keychain entries.

By: Dan

Dan — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 19:57:46 +0000

What about a way to do it within the downloads folder by file type, so only downloaded .DMG files would be un-quarantined?