The reason why Xcode 8.0 beta is shipped as a xip and not in a signed disk image is because the Xcode beta is freakin' huge! After decompressing it, Xcode 8 comes in at over 12GB! As a disk image, you'd be required to have both the disk image and Xcode exist on disk at the same time because you'd have to download it, mount it, copy Xcode to /Applications (which requires the Disk Image framework to decompress Xcode while copying it), unmount the disk image, and then delete the original image.Ī xip permits Archive Utility to do the decompression and deletion for you. That is, the ability to use signed xip archives and signed disk images is only useful on Mac OS X 10.12 or later. App Translocation was designed to fix a Gatekeeper vulnerability ( ) that allowed malicious actors to hijack signed (usually by Apple) applications by forcing them to load malicious external resources that are located in specific places on disk relative to the signed binary. It's to exclude an app from the new App Translocation security feature ( ) in Sierra. The purpose of the xip format and signed disk images isn't to prevent things like XcodeGhost, which was correctly stopped by Gatekeeper because the code signature was invalid.

dmg files have rudimentary checksums to warn the user that it may have been corrupted in transit, there are no safeguards against tampering.Īs of Mac OS X 10.11.5, the codesign tool supports signing disk images ( ).

Newest xcode