Do Microsoft Edge and Microsoft Teams cause problems with System Integrity Protection for you?

anacond42 wrote:

First, I just wanted to see if others are experiencing the same thing as I am on two separate Macs.

I'm not running Sonoma and I might not ever. All I can do is relate my past experiences that seem similar and how I fixed them.

No problem. I got the hint from this Stack Exchange page:

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/289071/how-do-i-reset-all-gatekeeper-rules

That's an interesting command. It might be useful in certain, very specific developer contexts.

It's possible that you have some kind of 3rd party tool that is corrupting the Gatekeeper database. One of the novel developments over the past few years in Mac circles is the social media influencer app. Instead of just posting on a blog or Twitter, certain influencers write apps that users install. These people earn their living through other means, so they don't need to charge money for these apps. Consequently, they are very popular. Anything involving security is of particular interest.

What this all means is that the likelihood of some 3rd party app directly corrupting various low-level security databases is higher than you would expect.

The only addition to the system is Dropbox, which is more high-level.

And an early-adopter of what I described above: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/09/20/dropbox-macos-security

In that case, I do not use any additional low-level extensions at all. (none are loaded in the "Extensions" list in the System Information app)

I sincerely doubt that is true.

First of all, these apps can be located in many different places. Even the list of a handful of locations that you might see discussed here in the forums or elsewhere on the internet is obsolete. On a modern Mac, they can be literally anywhere on any readable filesystem.

Secondly, that "Extensions" list is pretty useless for several reasons. It is specifically referring to "kernel extensions" which are more or less obsolete, especially on Apple Silicon. And that "Loaded" column is definitely wrong!

If you want to go investigating, just be careful. Don't attempt to delete or uninstall any system modifications you might find. If you do that incorrectly, you'll leave random parts permanently installed and running out of control.

Did you also try opening the Edge browser (if you have it on your system)? Did you perhaps find that it loads more slowly than other apps? Did you perhaps observe general slowness when launching apps after that?

I've got no need for 3rd party web browsers.

That makes sense, but it's also my problem. I was planning to use Apple's and Microsoft's feedback forms to contact them directly.

I can't speak for Microsoft, but Apple's consumer-level feedback page is just a bit-bucket. Maybe there's one marketing intern who totals up the number of keywords entered in a given year, and cross-references that with swear words. There is also a developer-oriented feedback (né bug reporting) system. Here, an engineering intern will total up the number of keywords entered in a given year, cross-referencing that with swear words.

I won't bother to give you links for either. I've wasted enough of your time. You can Google them yourself if you choose to waste more.

There appears to be a difference between new apps that launch with "Verifying..." dialogs and, what I'm experiencing, syspolicyd checks without the "Verifying..." dialogs. The former are fine with me.

I can reproduce the syspolicyd usage easily enough. I assume it is simply checking the signature for an app when it launches. That takes some time. Maybe Apple got rid of the verification dialog in Ventura. People were complaining about the dialog, so Apple got rid of the dialog - problem solved.

To illustrate, here are my largest apps:

I have a few more with 3 digits. Most are under 100 MB. Office apps are significantly larger than any other app. I don't have Teams or Edge. (Technically I was lying about the 3rd party web browsers. I do use Chrome just for checking HTTP accept-language header. That's literally all I use it for.)

It's possible that your direct-download apps are smaller than my App Store apps and using some funky shared executables. That kind of cleverness can easily confuse the system and cause all MS apps to require a full re-verification the next time they are launched. And perhaps there are deeper, system-level integrations that could invalidate the database for all apps. That would be my guess.

As Apple continues to port iOS to the Mac and purge the old Mac logic, they expose a certain level of fragility in various iOS architectures that were not designed for Mac-level abuse. To closer you stay to the latest, bleeding edge macOS version, the greater your exposure to these problems.

anacond42 wrote:

I'd like to report this issue to Apple (and/or Microsoft) so either they or Microsoft can fix it. Can anybody reproduce this behavior?

Don't waste your time. They don't care.

The problem is that Apple, Microsoft, and especially users are addicted to updates. Those apps are always launching slowly because every time you launch them, it's a new version.

This on macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

Exactly. See what I mean?

All you need to do is wait for version 14.4.2, AKA the next "fix".

Until then, stop wasting your time with those Terminal hacks. You aren't disabling System Integrity Protection. You're disabling Gatekeeper. Same idea though. You're addicted to "security fixes" because social media influencers on the internet have convinced you that you're constantly under hack attack. So obviously, you disable security to fix it. The Internet is the gift that keeps on giving.

Stop reading lies on the internet. That's the first thing. Anything you hear about Apple security isn't true. It's made up to sell 3rd party security software and/or boost the profits of Apple's biggest competitors.

Then, cancel your subscription to Microsoft Office and delete all the apps. Then, download Office again from the Mac App Store. Re-subscribe using Apple's payment system. This way, the technical restrictions in the Mac App Store will prevent Microsoft from constantly running Teams and OneDrive. It will also stop the automatic updates and all those "verifying" dialogs. With the Mac App Store, you will be in control of when to apply Office updates.

PS: On a modern Mac with SSD, those dialogs shouldn't be displaying for that long. Check your computers for various 3rd party "security" tools, "clean up" tools, or "speed booster" tools. Those all scams. Get rid of them. You should probably do research first and ask for help. Most such tools include low-level System Extensions that cannot be impossible to remove if you attempt to delete them incorrectly.

anacond42 wrote:

Just one correction: The "spctl" command I mentioned just resets Gatekeeper to a more pristine condition. It doesn't disable it.

That's not a correction. That is a Gatekeeper command, not an SIP command. I don't know what else you are doing. I'm just pointing out that Gatekeeper is a different system.

I don't see the Gatekeeper progress bar, I only see the "syspolicyd" process running for up to 8 seconds before the app loads.

I also have a pretty clean system, without any unnecessary extensions.

I have no idea what you consider "necessary" extensions. If there was anything "necessary", it would have been included with the operating system. On these forums, I see a lot of people's configurations. I can assure you that virtually every 3rd system modification is "unnecessary". I'm not talking about apps. In most cases, apps don't matter. I'm talking about the things that actually modify the low-level behaviour of the operating system. Those things are extremely popular and cause the vast majority of the problems reported here in the forums.

I can't reproduce the behaviour you are describing. I did used to see the "verifying" dialog pretty regularly on Monterey when running Office apps. Often, it would just appear on its own when the Microsoft auto-update mechanism ran. I'm guessing that Microsoft added some logic to pre-verify their apps so they would launch more quickly. I solved that by moving to Mac App Store versions.

If you want, you can bring up the issue in Microsoft's Support Forums. These forums are only answered by other end-users of Apple products like yourself. All you are going to get is one person's opinion about what you should do. In my opinion, you would be wasting your time trying to contact either Apple or Microsoft. Each company is only going to do what it thinks is best and blame the other if there's a problem. My approach is always to recommend ways to avoid other people's problems that you can't solve.