Unattended automatic updates

jorisvandersande
jorisvandersande
Community Member
in Mac

I appreciate the high frequency at which updates are being pushed out by the 1Password team. Especially for a security-related tool this is paramount.

For my daily work, I am logged in on my Mac as a regular user without administrative rights. Clicking the "Update" button on the update notification popup, results in OS X to present a dialog where I need to enter an administrator username and password. After that the update runs smoothly and automatically restarts 1Password to load the new version.

In my opinion, in general the workflow on a Mac is much smoother than that on Windows due to the lack of a constant stream of distrupting notifications, popups, dialogs, etc. that pester Windows. Unfortunately, more and more OS X software seems to adopt this Windows attention seeking behavior. Fortunately, 1Password still provides a very smooth workflow which minimises the amount of disturbances. With the update process as an exception, unfortunately.

Would it be possible to implement 1Password updates as an unattended automatic update? For instance, most virusscanners silently update themselves in the background without requiring any user interaction. I believe they are able to do so, by installing a "worker" or "helper" process running with Admin rights that is able to download and install updates from the Internet.

I understand the possible security implications of such a mechanism, so it is vital that the worker will only accept properly signed binaries, and never allows downgrades, to ensure malware can not undermine the security of 1Password.

Thanks for a wonderful product!

1Password Version: Not Provided
Extension Version: Not Provided
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Sync Type: Not Provided

Comments

  • ag_kevin
    ag_kevin

    Hi @jorisvandersande ,

    Thanks for the kind words! I certainly do see the advantage of automatic updates. We can certainly look into that. And as you mentioned, we already do check the integrity of the binaries so I don't imagine a security issue there. Compatibility issues would be a concern (e.g. a major OS upgrade) but not impossible to overcome.

    Thanks for the suggestion! I can't promise when or if it will happen at this time, but we'll look into it!

    Cheers,
    Kevin

This discussion has been closed.