This is a fork of a collection of profiles for the OSX Application Sandbox called Seatbelt. For some background information on how this whole thing works, check out Dion Blazakis's Blackhat Talk. Some guy also recently did "Buckle Up" which may help some. The original author's hopes were that people will start to make their own by maybe forking the original repository and adding new rules and profiles to it, and then committing back to it with pull-requests.

To get things rolling immediately you should just be able to run the corresponding shell scripts. The original author has taken care to make them portable. Dropping to a terminal (for example) and running: ./safari.sh should fire up a "fresh" Safari. To learn more about the sandbox profile syntax you can't easily google for them. You can however learn a bit by looking at the ones that ship with OS X by default by dropping to a terminal and looking in /usr/share/sandbox, /System/Library/Sandbox/Profiles, or /Library/Sandbox/Profiles, or System/Library/Sandbox/Profiles:

 stephens-computer:sandbox_profiles s7$ cd /usr/share/sandbox/
 stephens-computer:sandbox s7$ ls
 awacsd.sb                    mds.sb                       sshd.sb
 bsd.sb                       mdworker.sb                  syslogd.sb
 cvmsCompAgent.sb             named.sb                     xgridagentd.sb
 cvmsServer.sb                ntpd.sb                      xgridagentd_task_nobody.sb
 fontmover.sb                 portmap.sb                   xgridagentd_task_somebody.sb
 kadmind.sb                   preview.sb                   xgridcontrollerd.sb
 krb5kdc.sb                   quicklookd-job-creation.sb
 mDNSResponder.sb             quicklookd.sb

You can also glean a bit more by checking the manpages for sandbox-exec(1), sandbox_init(3), sandbox(7), and sandboxd(8).

Use the example.sb sandbox file that contains in particular the line

(trace "profile.sb")

This instructs sandbox-exec to output a profile.sb file that will contain the raw output of what resources are being accessed during the runtime of the target application.

You would therefore start the application with:

sandbox-exec -f example.sb /Path/To/The/Application/

Then run sandbox-simplify on the profile.sb and pipe it to another file:

sandbox-simplify profile.sb > simplified.sb

You can then start editing that simplified file to see what makes sense to keep, what can be compacted more and what should be changed.

A useful vi macro to keep handly is this:

%s/literal "\/Users\/replace_with_your_username/regex #"^\/Users\/[^\.]+/gc

This basically makes your profile work for people that don't have your same username.

You want to start from a basic sandbox profile that contains the bare minimum necessary to start the application. Something along the lines of this is a good starting point:

(version 1)
(debug allow)
(allow process*)
(deny default)

What this does it it allow processes to run and it is a whitelist based profile (i.e. the default policy is to not allow).

The next thing that you want to do is start

tail -f /var/log/system.log

All the denied by policy lines will end up in that file. Then start your application with your sandbox profile:

sandbox-exec -f <sandbox_file>.sb /path/to/the/app

You will then see in the tail -f terminal lines containing something like:

Dec 22 14:58:08 x sandboxd[12281] ([12280]): firefox-bin(12280) deny file-read-data /private/tmp

This is saying, for example, that firefox was denied "file-read-data" access to the file in /private/tmp. You should then evaluate if you want to allow that or not and in the first case add the entry that allows that in your sandbox file, like so:

(file-read-data
    (regex "^/private/tmp")
)

Continue iteratively until you reach a point where your application runs properly and all the error messages are thing you don't want to happen.

Safe hacking and remember to fasten your seatbelt :)

• Dion Blazakis's Blackhat Talk

• @synackpse's OSX Sandboxing Intro Blogpost

• Apple's Sandbox Guide

• Chromium sandboxing

• Tech Journal's Intro to OSX Sandboxing

• Iron Suite