5.23 System Integrity Protection status

Information

System Integrity Protection is a security feature introduced in OS X 10.11 El Capitan. System Integrity Protection restricts access to System domain locations and restricts runtime attachment to system processes. Any attempt to attempt to inspect or attach to a system process will fail. Kernel Extensions are now restricted to /Library/Extensions and are required to be signed with a Developer ID.

Rationale:

Running without System Integrity Protection on a production system runs the risk of the modification of system binaries or code injection of system processes that would otherwise be protected by SIP.

Solution

Perform the following while booted in macOS Recovery Partition.

1. Select Terminal from the Utilities menu

2. Run the following command in Terminal:

/usr/bin/csrutil enable

3. The output should be:

'Successfully enabled System Integrity Protection. Please restart the machine for the changes to take effect.'

4. Reboot.

If a change to the status is attempted from the booted Operating System rather than the recovery partition an error will be generated.

'csrutil: failed to modify system integrity configuration. This tool needs to be executed from the Recovery OS.'

See Also

https://workbench.cisecurity.org/files/2105

Item Details

Category: SYSTEM AND INFORMATION INTEGRITY

References: 800-53|SI-7(1)

Plugin: Unix

Control ID: 09fb01d0cc3cb9cee03af28c641c1a492272ee08689668d9d5211501ae3aa1ed