Read reviews, compare customer ratings, see screenshots, and learn more about Sandbox Status. Download Sandbox Status for macOS 10.11 or later and enjoy it on your Mac. Apps with full access have read access to almost every file on your computer and also write access to all files in your home directory. I sense an opportunity for a great freeware/shareware app to collect and enforce sandbox policies like this from a simple point-and-click interface. Ship it with several sandbox policies (fully examinable/tweakable, of course) and the user could just check a box next to the apps they want to secure, and it does all of this dirty work for them. A series of tutorials. This is the second part in a three-part series of tutorials on sandboxing, signing, notarizing, and distributing macOS apps outside of the Mac App Store. In this tutorial I’ll give you in-depth insight into the sandbox and then build an app that, whether sandboxed or not sandboxed, can read and write outside of its container — and can be either sold and distributed. Exploitable App is a sandbox for exploring the various ways that applications can be exploited by attackers. Designed to emulate a banking application with various vulnerabilities the Exploitable App is a learning platform that attempts to teach about common web security flaws.
Beside the pre-configured profiles, OS X’s sandbox wrapper command
sandbox-exec
provides a flexible configurationsyntax that allows one to create a customized sandbox that either blacklists or whitelists specific abilities of theapplication executed within.A sandbox profile defines what a application running inside the sandbox should be able to do. The following exampleprofile
no-network.sb
allows anything except any kind of network access. This might be useful if you want aapplication to keep your data private instead of sending it home:Replacing
allow
by deny
would deny anything except networking. It’s that easy.Other abilities include
file-read
, signal
, ipc-posix-shm
, process
, mach-lookup
etc. Some need additionalparameters like file- or folder names.The following link provides additional examples of sandbox profiles:
You can run any CLI or desktop application by executing it’s Mach-O binary file through
sandbox-exec
. The followingcommand runs VLC player without network access:Please note that while the sandbox mechanism is good enough for almost any use case, it still does not provide perfectsecurity, described e.g. here: http://www.coresecurity.com/content/apple-osx-sandbox-bypass
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It isn’t widely advertised, but macOS ships with a standalone sandboxing utility out of the box:
sandbox-exec
. While the very short manpage says the utility has been marked deprecated, and for quite a few major releases now, it’s used heavily by internal systems so it’s unlikely go away anytime soon.Sandbox configurations are writen in a subset of Scheme. A minimal useful starter example for wrapping a modern application might look something like this:
Saving the above as
config.sb
, you can use it to sandbox an app as follows:![Sandbox mac os Sandbox mac os](/uploads/1/3/4/1/134124478/886415769.png)
To see all the operations that were denied, open Applications → Utilities → Console and search for
sandbox
and the application name. Historically, you could use the (trace 'output')
command, but this seems dysfunctional on the latest macOS.Most modern applications will not function with such limited permissions, so expect some back and forth before your sandbox profile works.
![Run sandbox app Run sandbox app](/uploads/1/3/4/1/134124478/771318019.png)
Depending on your OS version, you can find some system sandbox examples in some of the following locations:
/Library/Sandbox/Profiles
/System/Library/Sandbox/Profiles
/usr/share/sandbox
The tool has virtually no official documentation so some hacker insight can come very handy. There’s a number of useful examples here:
Run Sandbox App
Further historical background and technical details can be found here:
Setting up a Sandbox from scratch can often be largely trial and error — disallow everything, and then follow the trail of errors to see what you need to enable as a bare minimum to make the app work.
Mac Run App In Sandbox
On the upside, it’s a great way to gain insight into what closed source binaries are trying to do on your system.