arianvp

Native Secure Enclave backed ssh keys on MacOS

It turns out that MacOS Tahoe can generate and use secure-enclave backed SSH keys! This replaces projects like https://github.com/maxgoedjen/secretive

There is a shared library /usr/lib/ssh-keychain.dylib that traditionally has been used to add smartcard support to ssh by implementing PKCS11Provider interface. However since recently it also implements SecurityKeyProivder which supports loading keys directly from the secure enclave! SecurityKeyProvider is what is normally used to talk to FIDO2 devices (e.g. libfido2 can be used to talk to your Yubikey). However you can now use it to talk to your Secure Enclave instead!

pudquick

brew is a bad neighbor

This isn't a guide about locking down homebrew so that it can't touch the rest of your system security-wise.

This guide doesn't fix the inherent security issues of a package management system that will literally yell at you if you try to do something about "huh, maybe it's not great my executables are writeable by my account without requiring authorization first".

But it absolutely is a guide about shoving it into its own little corner so that you can take it or leave it as you see fit, instead of just letting the project do what it likes like completely taking over permissions and ownership of a directory that might be in use by other software on your Mac and stomping all over their contents.

By following this guide you will:

• Never have to run sudo to forcefully change permissions of some directory to be owned by your account