unsigned kexts on Yosemite

Landon Fuller landonf at macports.org
Fri Jun 5 16:45:22 PDT 2015


On Jun 3, 2015, at 4:46, René J.V. Bertin <rjvbertin at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wednesday June 03 2015 16:47:39 Joshua Root wrote:
> 
>> Finally got around to trying an unsigned kext, and the answer is no,
>> neither kextload nor kextutil will load unsigned kexts at all (without
>> kext-dev-mode=1 in the kernel boot args).
> 
> Regardless of where you're loading them from? IIRC there was a distinction between kexts installed under /System and kexts installed in "user land", probably in places where they're not picked up by the default kext search algorithm.

Mavericks allows unsigned kexts in /Library, but Yosemite requires that all kexts be signed by Apple, or by a ‘blessed’ Apple-signed Developer ID certificate, regardless of location:
	http://xref.plausible.coop/source/xref/macosx-10.10.1/kext_tools-384.1.4/security.c#1238

It’s easy to runtime patch kextd to accept kexts signed with additional anchors, but that’s probably not shippable as a general solution.

It may also be possible to bypass kextd by just calling OSKextLoadWithOptions() directly, but if that does work in Yosemite, it seems very likely to break in Yosemite+1 of OS X when they start applying additional iOS-style restrictions based on code signing entitlements + MAC.

Personally, I’m just staying with Mavericks.

-landonf
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