Why does OS X 10.7.4 want me to move my application to the trash?

Question

We have an application for OS X that we distribute on our own website, it is included in the preferences panel and comes with three daemons. Starting from 10.7.4. One of the daemons no longer starts, and OS X says the following:

Unable to open YZ. You must transfer it to the basket.

The console doesn’t help me much, but an error message appears:

23.06.12 18:22:15,284 com.apple.launchd.peruser.501: ([0x0-0x176176].com.bananaglue.control.helper[1902]) Exited: Killed: 9 

Same thing on OS X 10.8. We did not change anything, and before it worked without errors.

Any tips on how to solve this?

Answer 1

Check the following explanation:

Authorization of applications is canceled. Although this application was signed by a specific developer, the certificate for this application has been revoked. There may be a problem. The application cannot be opened.

Quote from Krystof Vasa from Fuel Collective:

Apple for some (unknown to me) reasons allowing 10.8 Gate Keeper as early as 10.7.4. Gate Keeper should allow you to block the launch of applications other than the AppStore or without a subscription. Gate Keeper settings are located in System Preferences> Security and Privacy . Make sure it is installed on Everywhere . If this does not help, here is the Gate Keeper disabling guide, which should not work in 10.7.4 anyway.

Disable GateKeeper by running the following command:

 sudo spctl --master-disable 

Perhaps you can contact Krystof Vasa and ask how they accurately fixed the problem.

Answer 2

There is less “sledgehammer” to fix this. Today I ran into this problem, and this happened due to a combination of two things: the extended quarantine attribute is set in the application suite, and the signature is broken, so typing:

 codesign -vv <app bundle> 

leads to:

 <app bundle>: code has no resources but signature indicates they must be present 

You can view advanced attributes by typing ls -la @ in the terminal. It will show you "com.apple.quarantine" in the file.

Instead of disabling Gatekeeper, you can use the following terminal command to remove all extended file attributes:

 xattr -c <app bundle> 

I'm going to take a walk to find out if I can understand exactly how the signature is broken, so I can fix it (I'm a new developer at the company that does this) and I came across this question.

Disabling Gatekeeper is not at all what I would recommend. When the Gatekeeper warns you about something, you get additional information about it and its possible that it can save you from accidentally launching something that you do not want to run.