alt Hacker NewsOkay hear me out, I use little snitch for a while. Great product. Love finding out what phones where. I make every single request (except my browser, because I'm fine with their sandbox) block until I approve.
Recently I was wondering how you really have to trust something like little snitch given its a full kernel extension effectively able to MITM your whole network stack.
So I went digging (and asked some agents to deep research), and I couldn't find much interesting about the company or its leadership at all.
All a long way to say, anyone know anything about this company?
Replies
> All a long way to say, anyone know anything about this company?
Yes, they are indie Mac developers who have been in business for more than 20 years, and Little Snitch for Mac is beloved by many users for a long time.
disclaimer: I co-develop (FOSS) Little Snitch / Open Snitch inspired firewall but for Android
> little snitch given its a full kernel extension
On macOS, don't think Little Snitch needs kernel exclaves / extensions. Apple provides userspace ("Network Extension") APIs (however limited) for apps like Little Snitch to use (instead of pf).
> effectively able to MITM your whole network stack
"MITM" means something else, anywho... if network observability (not firewall) is the primary need, cross-platform (GUI) sniffers like Sniffnet exist: https://github.com/GyulyVGC/sniffnet
Disclaimer: I'm the developer of Little Snitch for Linux. Regarding MITM concerns: The eBPF component, which actually sees all the traffic, is Open Source (GPLv2). You can review it on Github and verify whether it sends any data to user space: https://github.com/obdev/littlesnitch-linux
But the trust issue is still real, the daemon has to run as root because it needs to watch for new mounts and keep a table of file system roots up-to-date, even after loading all the eBPF programs. As a root process, it can technically do whatever it wants. Unless you limit it with a kind of mandatory access control (SELinux or similar).
This is the very first release and we will probably come up with a more restricted permission requirement in the future. For the moment, I try to catch up with bug reports. There seems to be more diversity in the Linux landscape than I had expected.