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One other obvious "Turing-hard" spyware side-channel, is that it's basically up to the application developer to come up with a list of Internet domains it should be able to connect to, to put into the app's entitlements; and it's up to humans at Apple to determine whether that list is sane — often by starting up the app with syscalls to the network stack shimmed/traced, doing packet captures, and seeing what the app says to each of the domains it lists itself as entitled to talk to.

You'd think that maybe restricting connections to e.g. domains that are rooted in a zone the developer has proven ownership of, would be fine... but there are third-party advertising, analytics, and fingerprinting services that allow you to CNAME them as subdomains of your domain to evade ad-blocker signature recognition.

And, of course, no user could ever be expected to figure any of this out if asked in a prompt. "Example App is asking me to allow it to connect to abcdefg.example.com? Well, they own that, don't they? Why wouldn't I allow that?"



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