File Quarantine

Feature requests for the Mac OS X version of Transmission
Post Reply
bsteinb
Posts: 1
Joined: Fri Sep 11, 2009 7:26 am

File Quarantine

Post by bsteinb »

For quite some time, there has been a ticket in the Transmission issue tracker regarding the file quarantine feature of Mac OS X and its use (or lack thereof) by Transmission.

Since this feature has not been requested by many users, the discussion has been somewhat slow up to now. Therefore I wanted to present file quarantine in this forum and put it up to a more public discussion, whether this feature is considered a good thing.

So, for those users that do not know about file quarantine: Starting in Mac OS 10.5 Apple made available an API to application developers that allowed them to mark files that had been downloaded. Upon opening these files the user was presented a dialog along the lines of: "The file … has ben downloaded by … Do you wish to open it? Yes / No"

In 10.5 this dialog only mimicked the behaviour of … that other operating system. In 10.6 the functionality however has been extended to match the file that is to be opened against an internal list of checksums for files that are known to contain malware. Thus I think file quarantine has more or less turned from an annoyance to a desirable feature.

A better description can be found at Apple.

What is your opinion on file quarantine?
collegeitdept
Posts: 10
Joined: Sat Feb 07, 2009 9:54 pm

Re: File Quarantine

Post by collegeitdept »

I agree!!!

When will this BASIC feature be implemented?????

PLEASE IMPLEMENT THIS BASIC FEATURE!
John Clay
Transmission Project
Posts: 993
Joined: Sat Jan 14, 2006 6:02 pm

Re: File Quarantine

Post by John Clay »

collegeitdept wrote:I agree!!!

When will this BASIC feature be implemented?????

PLEASE IMPLEMENT THIS BASIC FEATURE!
It's not going to happen.
collegeitdept
Posts: 10
Joined: Sat Feb 07, 2009 9:54 pm

Re: File Quarantine

Post by collegeitdept »

John Clay,

why not?

Is it just too complicated?
John Clay
Transmission Project
Posts: 993
Joined: Sat Jan 14, 2006 6:02 pm

Re: File Quarantine

Post by John Clay »

collegeitdept wrote:John Clay,

why not?

Is it just too complicated?
Read the ticket history linked in the first post.
collegeitdept
Posts: 10
Joined: Sat Feb 07, 2009 9:54 pm

Re: File Quarantine

Post by collegeitdept »

John, i read it but I think you may be little mistaken... Though I think I know where you're coming from.

I think you're thinking the LSQuarentine feature will present a message to the user "This file was downloaded from the internet.. do you want to proceed?" or something to that effect. And because the user knowingly grabbed the Torrent file from the internet, the user will always choose continue/open.

And using this dialogue box, you would be correct. Such a dialogue box would be a complete nuisance and provide no benefit to the user and only be an annoyance.


However, this is not what we are talking about.

LSQuarantine is a new feature introduced in Snow Leopard and is only in Snow Leopard.
LSQuarantine scans the (metadata of the) file and verifies it against a predetermined list of signature patterns Mac OS X Snow Leopard has… and if it matches – it gets flagged. When the user tries to launch an data file that has been flagged, the user is presented with the new Malware detected warning dialogue:

http://km.support.apple.com/library/APP ... 662-2b.png


This and only aspect of the LSQuarantine should really be implemented in Transmission. The legwork is done by the OS itself. Although this malware detection feature is extremely rudimentary and only provides very limited protection to Snow Leopard users only – any added protection for the Mac user is good and that’s why Transmission would be the most obvious program to support this feature. After all the main vector a malware will target is will naturally be P2P programs like Transmission. In fact the only malware that actually spread in the wild (that I can remember) was spread in pirated copies of iLife and iWork torrents – and that’s Transmission.

Please reconsider your veto of this feature. PLEASE!
kevinobies
Posts: 12
Joined: Thu Jun 09, 2011 12:47 am

Re: File Quarantine

Post by kevinobies »

I hope now that Miner-D is out spreading over BitTorrent, that this stubborn refusal to make Transmission and its massive user-base more secure is re-evaluated/reconsidered.

Security is imperative and will only become more of an issue to Mac users. Apple already has a very minor and bare-bones mitigation technique that it wants all other developers to utilize (and MANY have)... I hope that Transmission will one day be brought into today and utilize already available tools from Apple and make all of its users more secure.
livings124
Transmission Developer
Posts: 3142
Joined: Fri Jan 13, 2006 8:08 pm

Re: File Quarantine

Post by livings124 »

kevinobies
Posts: 12
Joined: Thu Jun 09, 2011 12:47 am

Re: File Quarantine

Post by kevinobies »

THANK YOU!

Seriously, the Mac community should be very grateful for this one feature.

This one feature will make the 2.5 the most important/significant release of Transmission - because it's finally as secure as other internet Apps.

Again, thank you.
Post Reply