If you’ve got on this blog (directly, or via syndication) you’d have to have been living under a rock to not know about the libwebp supply chain disaster. An unfortunate casualty of inept programming just happened to be any app in the Electron ecosystem that doesn’t undergo bleeding-edge updates.

Former cow-orker Tom Sellers (one of the best humans in cyber) did a great service to the macOS user community with tips on how to stay safe on macOS. His find + strings + grep combo was superbly helpful and I hope many macOS users did the command line dance to see how negligent their app providers were/are.

But, you still have to know what versions are OK and which ones are not to do that dance. And, having had yet-another immune system invasion (thankfully, not COVID, again) on top of still working through long COVID (#protip: you may be over the pandemic, but I guarantee it’s not done with you/us for a while) which re-sapped mobility energy, I put my sedentary time to less woesome use by hacking together a small, Golang macOS CLI to help ferret out bad Electron-based apps you may have installed.

I named it positron, since that’s kind of the opposite of Electron, and I was pretty creativity-challenged today.

It does virtually the same thing as Tom’s strings and grep does, just in a single, lightweight, universal, signed macOS binary.

When I ran it after the final build, all my Electron-based apps were . After deleting some, and updating others, this is my current status:

$ find /Applications -type f -name "*Electron Framework*" -exec ./positron "{}" \;
/Applications/Signal.app: Chrome/114.0.5735.289 Electron/25.8.4 🟢
/Applications/Keybase.app: Chrome/87.0.4280.141 Electron/11.5.0 🔴
/Applications/Raindrop.io.app: Chrome/102.0.5005.167 Electron/19.0.17 🔴
/Applications/1Password.app: Chrome/114.0.5735.289 Electron/25.8.1 🟢
/Applications/Replit.app: Chrome/116.0.5845.188 Electron/26.2.1 🟢
/Applications/lghub.app: Chrome/104.0.5112.65 Electron/20.0.0 🔴

It’s still on you to do the find (cooler folks run fd) since I’m not about to write a program that’ll rummage across your SSDs or disc drives, but it does all the MachO inspection internally, and then also does the SemVer comparison to let you know which apps still suck at keeping you safe.

FWIW, the Keybase folks did accept a PR for the libwebp thing, but darned if I will spend any time building it (I don’t run it anymore, anyway, so I should just delete it).

The aforementioned signed, universal, macOS binary is in the GitLab releases.

Stay safe out there!

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from rud.is authored by hrbrmstr. Read the original post at: https://rud.is/b/2023/09/30/avoid-libwebp-electron-woes-on-macos-with-positron/