We are designing a bounded local macOS operation with a supervisor, controller and helper. All three must be unable to cause prohibited network effects, including attributable delegated requests, before admission and until quiescence. Unrelated applications must retain their normal network access. We are seeking an API contract clarification, not reporting a reproduced OS bug. No NetworkExtension provider has been activated for this design.
Our reviewed SDK is MacOSX27.0.sdk; its presence is not a runtime qualification. Please identify the supported macOS versions for your answer. The design must tolerate provider crash, termination, disconnection and unresponsiveness, and operation lease expiry/revocation. Administrative filter disablement or privileged reconfiguration is a separate unresolved threat-model case, not something we assume ordinary failure handling covers.
We reviewed content-filter deployment in TN3134 and the nullable/delegated audit tokens in NEFilterFlow. We understand that NEURLFilterManager.shouldFailClosed concerns URL-filter decisions, not an established guarantee for arbitrary content-filter traffic. EndpointSecurity AUTH deadlines are also a separate mechanism. The VPN routing article documents dropping during specific transitions, but has system exceptions; TN3120 excludes using a packet tunnel as a dropping content filter. We therefore have not adopted that workaround.
- For macOS NEFilterDataProvider / NEFilterPacketProvider, is there a supported configuration that keeps prohibited operation traffic denied when the provider crashes, is killed, disconnects, hangs or cannot deliver a decision? Please distinguish new flows, existing/previously permitted flows, queued data, restart intervals, and configuration disable/removal.
- What supported admission and teardown guarantees allow releasing the first protected process only after enforcement is effective, then retaining denial through lease revocation and shutdown? An enabled configuration alone would not demonstrate that barrier.
- How should this guarantee cover operation-caused DNS and delegated system-service traffic, including absent/ambiguous audit tokens, without denying unrelated host traffic? If content filters cannot meet that scope, can App Sandbox without network entitlements provide the independent denial boundary for these roles, and what documented exclusions or additional constraints apply?
A reference to the supported contract, or a precise statement of the requirement that needs to change, would let us select an architecture before implementing and activating a native provider. We are not requesting private APIs or an unsupported packet-tunnel filter.
