Microsoft Edge popping shells on macOS

Microsoft Edge popping shells on macOS

If you’re wondering why Microsoft Edge on Mac spawns a bash shell on Mac you might have the same reaction and thought process as me.

• I don’t want my browser to be able to spawn a shell (or possibly any program that isn’t shipped with the browser)
• Is there a better way to do this? probably!
• Can we turn this off!?
• Why?

Let us look at the last question — why? If we inspect the process.args we can derive an indication of what Microsoft are getting at :

ioreg -d2 -c IOPlatformExpertDevice | awk -F\" '/IOPlatformUUID/{print $(NF-1)}'

Essentially it appears that Microsoft are ID-ing your Mac hardware here using the IOPlatformUUID. I can think of two reasons for using the IOPlatformUUID :

• To track your device for advertising purposes
• To identify your device for use in conditional access use cases

For now I’m interested to see if this can be turned off or if it is documented anywhere? Let me know in the comments if you have any thoughts or pointers!