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Florian A.1's avatar
Florian A.1
New member | Level 1
10 years ago

Why does Dropbox ask for your computer password

Hi, I just came across this blog post detailing some, shall we say, unorthodox ways Dropbox is circumventing OS X security features and tricking users into sharing their admin password: http://appl...
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Richard P.'s avatar
Richard P.
Icon for Super User alumni rankSuper User alumni
10 years ago

Once again, the dialog is NOT being faked - that claim has been debunked a lot in the past week or so since the claim was made, its a perfectly normal OSX privilege raising authentication dialog.

The "fake dialog" determination was based on the fact that some of the text is misaligned and its general look and feel, but you can reproduce that with your own OSX authentication dialog by supplying the same text to the call - 

https://developer.apple.com/reference/security/1669767-authorization_services_c#//apple_ref/doc/constant_group/Name_Tags

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Security/Reference/authorization_ref/#//apple_ref/c/func/AuthorizationCopyRights

Its a proper OSX dialog, just using an older system C API available on OSX since 10.3 whereas most people have moved over to the newer ObjC and Swift based calls which look different, hence the confusion.

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