“I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book” - Groucho Marx At around 16 I started gaining an interest in Psychology, I even began an in-depth study of hypnosis, reading every book I could find on the subject; the internet wasn’t a thing back then. By the time I started University, other interests took precedence and psychology was left at the wayside.

The year was 2015… Justin Trudeau, at 44, took leadership in Canada Myanmar held its first free election in 25 years Gay marriage was legalised across the US Tesla announced the ‘Powerwall home battery’ Space X launched the first reusable rocket into orbit and recovered it Taylor Swift pulled her music from Spotify, whilst the Beatles added theirs….. Medium, just 3 years old, was a little known website allowing people to create their own blogs in a simple, yet elegant fashion.

Apple’s recent presentation of the new Macbook Pro has had rather negative feedback. I too was disappointed when the end arrived and all we’d seen was something related to Apple TV (not interested), the demise of the Macbook Air and a new line up of Pros. Like many others, I’ve been waiting for quite some time to upgrade my Mac. In fact, my mini is nearing 10 years old and no longer supported by Apple and Google Chrome (at least there’s Firefox)!

An English bank, once a highly respected establishment, one you could trust and entrust with personal data, common sense and good practices; sadly this is no longer the case. With the fast moving technological era that we’re now living in, it amazes me how the mighty have fallen. Whilst reporting of data breaches from large, international companies are all too common these days (Sony, Yahoo, Ashley Madison etc.), it’s hard to believe that simple bad practices are not only still implemented, but the reporting of such practices ignored.

Each year Apple brings new features to OS X. Features that aim to secure the system. Features that bring about discussions that suggest OS X is becoming a ‘Walled Garden’ like IOS and question “Why is apple making OS X more like IOS?”. So, we now have Gatekeeper, Sandboxing and System Integrity Protection (aka rootless). There’s no question that Apple takes security seriously, though I do sometimes wonder about some of the solutions they provide, such as SIP, which has made developer lives so difficult that some have abandoned development, whilst others use more nefarious methods:

The contents and solution to this problem may seem obvious, but it wasn’t to me, so I decided to write about my research, in-case I’m not alone. If you didn’t notice the repetition of the word “THE” in the header image above, you too may have missed the blindingly obvious which I discuss below! The problem When developing an OS X kernel extension (kext), it is sometimes a requirement that we develop a user-land application in tandem, in order to control the tasks performed in the kext, or receive notifications from the kernel.

As a software engineer working in the field of security, I needed to know if a user was that of the local machine, or a user authenticated by Active Directory. The way in which accounts (users and groups) are identified by macOS(or Unix variants) differs from those under Windows Windows associates a user account with a Security Identifier (SID), along with a user’s credentials; name and password. In contrast, macOS is all about the uid (user id) and gid (group id), as is well known to those also familiar with Linux.

Finding information on how to monitor when processes are terminated was hard to come by and if my memory serves, I believe that it was only with the assistance of Quinn @ Apple who led me to the rather simple method that I present below. Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) is an Apple technology that allows performing multi-threaded code, without having to think too carefully about the intricacies usually required, which can cause various classic problems.

So, this is the first post of my first ever blog…yeah, I know it’s almost 2016 and I’ve worked in IT for more than 15 years, but get over it! So, why blog now? Well, I’ve started becoming more active and vocal as a developer within communities such as Stack Overflow (mostly Qt based) and direct e-mails with other professionals, bouncing ideas around and helping each other out (Hi Patrick! @objective-see).