Here it is a version I consider good enough to come out of draft status. I have added more information – one thing I was especially interested was to match the available operations in the SBPL syntax with the system/kernel functions that they control. This helps to better understand what is the impact of each operation. Appendix B features the lazy IDC script I used to extract this information from the sandbox kernel module (then I had to match with XNU kernel sources)....

After quite a few hours typing and testing stuff, here it is a very early draft of my attempt to document Apple’s sandbox implementation. The most difficult part in writing technical documentation or business plans is to get the first draft more or less ready. It’s even worse when there’s not much information about the subject. But here it is something with already quite some significant content. In this draft I don’t like the writing style – it’s still very confuse and boring....

I was just messing with Apple’s sandbox implementation to see if it was possible to close a “vulnerability” in iTunes (more on that later after Apple answers my email) and decided to experiment with something that has been in my mind for a long time and never bothered to try. The idea is to use the sandbox feature to find, for example, hidden files that applications use for serial numbers, time limits, demo limits, etc, or to trace install scripts or malware....

I just discovered that iTunes 10.4 finally introduced support to load m3u files. If you are importing large quantities of MP3 archives like me then you probably will be very annoyed by the mess that iTunes 10.4 will make out of this – playlists will be created and a ugly mess will emerge (and takes longer to process). So it was time to try to remove this feature, which is curious since I always wanted this in iTunes, before I surrended myself to its way of managing MP3s....

One known problem with Apple’s fork of open source software is their slowness in fixing vulnerabilities and bugs. GDB fork isn’t immune to this; it was forked around release 6.6 or something like that and lots of stuff isn’t kept in sync with GNU’s GDB version. The short story for this bug is that you can’t have a commands command inside a define command. This creates some problems for useful scripting....