Vigil: a Mac security checkup in two seconds
One window shows whether a Mac has its key protections on, which apps can use the camera, microphone and screen, and what starts on its own.
- 5check groups: protection, sign-in, sharing, permissions, startup
- ~2 sfor a full checkup
- 0system changes or admin passwords
Challenge
The most important macOS security settings are spread across a dozen places in System Settings and Terminal commands. A regular user will not check them all, and tools that do often want full privileges themselves or send data elsewhere.
My role
The whole project: idea, code, documentation and release.
What I did
- Protection: FileVault, firewall, SIP, Gatekeeper, automatic security updates and how fresh the XProtect definitions are.
- Sign-in and sharing: screen lock, automatic login, guest account, remote login, screen and file sharing, AirDrop and apps listening on the network.
- Permissions: reads the TCC databases read-only to show who has Full Disk Access, screen recording, camera and microphone.
- Startup: every agent and daemon is checked with the Security framework (SecStaticCodeCheckValidity), the same API Gatekeeper uses. Ad-hoc and broken signatures are flagged.
- Each finding has a button that opens the right place in System Settings. There is also a --report text mode for Terminal.
Safety
Every check uses a public macOS command or reads a file, nothing runs as root. The app writes nothing, never asks for an admin password and makes no network connections. The README documents the source of each check and the tool’s limits, for example that it is not an antivirus.
Result
- v1.0 released under the MIT licence, universal for Apple Silicon and Intel, macOS 14 or later.
Tools
Swift, SwiftUI, Security framework, SQLite (read-only), launchctl, lsof, fdesetup, spctl, csrutil