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objective-see / OverSight

OverSight monitors a mac's mic and webcam, alerting the user when the internal mic is activated, or whenever a process accesses the webcam.
GNU General Public License v3.0
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2.1.4 Install fails if not admin #38

Closed rothaar closed 1 year ago

rothaar commented 1 year ago

Seems to fail somewhat ungracefully if you try to install from a regular user account, rather than asking to authenticate, even when one tries to use the sudo CLI approach. Is it truly intended only to install when logged into the GUI as an admin? Below is the error I receive when running, from an admin/sudoers account:

sudo Downloads/OverSight\ Installer.app/Contents/MacOS/OverSight\ Installer -install

Screen Shot 2022-12-13 at 21 37 59
objective-see commented 1 year ago

"Is it truly intended only to install when logged into the GUI as an admin?" ...unfortunately yes.

This is because the mechanism the OverSight uses to (continually) monitor for mic/webcam events requires administrative privileges ...so even if you elevate at the time of install, this does not suffice.

A (possible) solution would be to create a launch daemon/service that could then run w/ elevated privileges. However, this would greatly complicate everything about OverSight (as now it's a nice standalone, self-contained app) ...hence the current approach is "only run on default / admin accounts" 🥲

(For more info, see: https://github.com/objective-see/OverSight/issues/34)

hmijail commented 1 year ago

so even if you elevate at the time of install, this does suffice

Did you mean "does NOT suffice"?

I spent a while trying to fix things on my side before coming to find some official information. So would be great to have this info in the tools' page.

objective-see commented 1 year ago

@hmijail - good catch, edited the comment to say, "does not suffice"

Also good suggestion, I've added the following to the OverSight page: image

hmijail commented 1 year ago

Given that it's under the "Installing Oversight" header, I'm afraid the "run" part is not clear and I'd still think "no problem, I will install from the admin account"... ... but that might be me.

objective-see commented 1 year ago

Fair, further clarified to point out it can only be installed for accounts w/ admin privileges:


Due to the mechanism used by OverSight to monitor for mic and webcam access, it can only be installed for accounts with administrative privileges (which is the default for accounts on macOS). ```