Comment by eridius
10 years ago
> Why not displaying a simple yes/no popup
Because granting accessibility access is far more dangerous than granting access to contacts / calendar. The latter just exposes some of your user data. The former gives the app a huge amount of control over your computer.
What exactly is so dangerous? Any app can take screenshots , listen to keyboard entries, send keys, move the mouse pointer and upload stuff to a server without any AXApi permission.
Forbidding window movement doesn't add any security at all.
Anyways, all I want a simple prompt explaining what the Accessibility API does and yes/no buttons.
One example that comes to my mind, is that you won't be able to copy any data from keychain. In fact, no one can access protected keychain data, if any app that is not in Accessibility "listens to keyboard".
http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/212622/keychain-won...
Well, that's obviously a bug in OSX.
I'm not saying that accessibility enabled apps can't do any harm, of course they can. My point is that they can't do more damage then regular applications you run on your mac.
The only way to run third party apps in a kind of secure environment is sandboxing.
All this accessibility api lockdown stuff from Apple is just pseudo-security.
3 replies →
Pure speculations: Wouldn't it be possible for an app without accessibility access to just kill and relaunch another app in a wrapper? This wrapper having hooks into system APIs?
1 reply →