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Internet Access Policy – Developer Documentation

This section is for app developers. If you are not a developer, you can safely skip it.

Create an Internet Access Policy for your app in just a few minutes

The fastest way to create an Internet Access Policy (IAP) is to use our example as a template.

It covers normal connections as well as connections via system services. All you need to do is to edit and adjust these two files:

These example files alone will probably be enough to create an IAP for your own app. Still, don't skip the short information below:

A few more things you should know

Here is an index of everything else you might find useful:

File format

Starting in Little Snitch 4.0.5, Little Snitch not only supports Internet Access Policies in Property List format (InternetAccessPolicy.plist), but also in JSON format (InternetAccessPolicy.json). They both have the same logical structure and you can use whichever one you prefer. All information on this page is valid for both formats, even if they only mention one.

You can convert from a Property List IAP to a JSON IAP using the following command:

plutil -convert json -r -e json InternetAccessPolicy.plist

… and back from a JSON IAP to a Property List IAP using this command:

plutil -convert plist -e plist InternetAccessPolicy.json

Connections and Services

Your app establishes connections using various means like a low-level socket up to high-level APIs like NSURLSession. These kinds of connections can be documented in the Internet Access Policy using an entry in the Connections array, as shown above.

But what if you’re writing an app that shows a map using Apple’s MapKit framework? In that case, your app doesn’t establish any connection by itself, but instead a macOS daemon is responsible for loading the map data. In this situation, you can add an entry in the Services array that documents the fact that your app uses MapKit and Little Snitch can show this fact to the user.

The services in the IAP should include everything that establishes a network connection on your behalf of your app that you do not ship with the app. This does not include XPC Services or frameworks that ship as part of your app (see the section about nested IAPs for further information). Examples of services used by your app are:

See Service identifiers below for a discussion of how to specify what services your app uses.

Localization

The Internet Access Policy contains texts shown to the user. If your application is available in multiple languages, you also want those texts to be available in these languages. There are two ways to localize an Internet Access Policy:

An Internet Access Policy localized with strings files

Instead of human readable texts for the keys ApplicationDescription, Purpose and DenyConsequences, enter unique keys. Translate these keys to human readable text in localized InternetAccessPolicy.strings files:

MyApp.app/Contents/Resources/InternetAccessPolicy.plist
MyApp.app/Contents/Resources/language.lproj/InternetAccessPolicy.strings

Download example

An Internet Access Policy for a single executable application

IAPs for executables without a bundle directory have to be integrated in the Info.plist file. Read more…

Specification of keys

Key Type Description
DeveloperName String, optional The human readable name of your company. Presented to the user as the source of the information.
ApplicationDescription String, required A general description of the app.
Website String, optional A URL pointing to the website of the app, including the URL scheme, e.g. “https://obdev.at/littlesnitch”.
Connections Array, optional An array of connection description dictionaries with the keys defined below
IsIncoming Boolean, optional Whether incoming (YES) or outgoing (NO) connections are matched. If omitted, matches outgoing connections.
Host String, required A comma-separated list of host or domain names, IP address ranges or a placeholder like local-net. See Which connection descriptions are shown for details.
NetworkProtocol String, optional Can be one of TCP, UDP or ICMP. If omitted, matches any protocol.
Port String, optional A comma-separated list of port ranges, e.g. 20-30, 80, 443. Defaults to 0-65535.
Relevance String, optional Indicates how important the connection is for the proper functioning of the application. Values can be Essential or Default. Defaults to Default. Use Essential only if your app is useless without this connection. You can still describe DenyConsequences if you choose default relevance.
Purpose String, required Describes the purpose of the connection. This text is shown to the user as-is, so use easy to understand sentences. Markdown-style links are supported.
DenyConsequences String, optional Describes the consequences of denying the connection. Markdown-style links are supported.
Services Array, optional An array of service description dictionaries with the keys defined below.
Identifier String, optional A unique identifier for the service. See Service identifiers below.
Name String, required A short, human-readable name for the service, e.g. “MapKit”.
Purpose String, required Describes the purpose of the service in context of the application. This text is shown to the user as-is, so use easy to understand sentences. Markdown-style links are supported.
Localizations Dictionary, optional For apps with embedded Info.plist, localization strings are placed here. See section Single executable applications above.

Service identifiers

By specifying an Identifier for a service as opposed to only the Name and Purpose, Little Snitch can understand what service you mean and give that entry special treatment. This is not implemented as of Little Snitch 4.4, but it is recommended that you add identifiers wherever possible so future versions of Little Snitch can – for example – add an appropriate icon for the service in the user interface when showing your app’s IAP.

In general, if a service is clearly implemented by a specific app or framework, use its bundle identifier (or code signing identifier). For example:

If it is not as clear cut as in the examples above, please follow these guidelines:

Here are a few examples that follow these rules:

Presentation in Little Snitch

Little Snitch parses the data you provide and presents it in an appropriate format.

In places where users actively look for information on connections, Little Snitch shows everything that is relevant. That is, the ApplicationDescription followed by the Purpose and DenyConsequences for all relevant connection descriptions (see below for an explanation of Which connection descriptions are shown).

When users are about to deny a connection only the short DenyConsequences are shown. This provides a means of last resort to inform your users that they are about to adversely affect your app’s functionality.

Note that if the Detail Level setting is set to “Omit port and protocol” in Little Snitch, port and protocol information may be omitted from the IAP text unless it causes ambiguities (e.g. because that would overlap with another connection your IAP describes).

The following sections explain how the information from the Internet Access Policy is used in different parts of Little Snitch’s user interface.

Connection alert

If Little Snitch is running in Alert Mode and no rule matches the connection your app tries to establish, users are presented with a connection alert. Expanding the Research Assistant shows all of the information relevant to this specific connection.

Clicking the “Deny…” button shows only the DenyConsequences. Note that what is shown here depends on the options the user has selected in the connection alert. For example, if they are about to deny “Any Connection”, more DenyConsequences may be shown than if they only deny connections to the specific domain.

Network Monitor

In the inspector of the Network Monitor, Little Snitch shows information about the connections selected in the connection list. Expanding the Research Assistant shows all of the relevant information.

Clicking the “X” button in a connection row to create a Deny-rule shows only the DenyConsequences. Note that what is shown here depends on what row the user clicked on. For example, if they clicked on the row next to an app’s name to deny any connection, more DenyConsequences may be shown than if they only deny connections of that app to a specific domain.

Configuration

The Research Assistant in the Little Snitch app is located at the bottom of the right-hand info sidebar and shows information about the selected rules.

Little Snitch also shows the DenyConsequences in various places when the user is about to create a rule that denies connections, e.g. using the rule editor or when creating rules from suggestions.

Which connection descriptions are shown

The algorithm which descriptions to choose under which circumstances is subject to change from version to version. This section describes the behavior of Little Snitch 4.0.6, newer versions may differ slightly.

Hosts and domains

The Host field of a connection description is a comma-separated list of host names, domain names, or other values as described below. The basic format and meaning is as follows:

Starting in Little Snitch 4.4.3, the following values are also supported:

It is possible to create connection descriptions with overlapping Host values. For example, you could have a description for Host: sw-update.example.com (one specific host) and another, more general one for Host: *.example.com (the whole domain). Because the specific host is in the domain, both descriptions match when looking up information for sw-update.obdev.at.

Also, multiple descriptions can match because Little Snitch shows IAP information relevant to what the user has currently selected in the connection alert or other places. For example, you could have descriptions for Host: www.example.com and Host: sw-update.example.com that do not overlap, but when the user creates a rule for the domain example.com, both descriptions are relevant.

In these situations, Little Snitch uses a set of criteria to determine which descriptions to show. These are designed to keep the information shown to the user as concise as possible to avoid information overload, while giving you as the developer precise control over what should be shown for a particular connection. In short, if there’s an exact match with one of the descriptions, only that description is shown. Otherwise, all relevant descriptions are shown.

Example 1

As an example, assume there are two connection descriptions (the Purpose fields are overly terse for illustration purposes):

What Little Snitch shows depends on what the user selects:

While all these are technically correct, it may not be very useful to show both descriptions in the latter two cases because their Purpose texts overlap in what they say. It is unnecessary to tell the user twice that the app checks for software updates.

Exact matches for domains and “any connection”

To handle these cases better, there is a way to specify a Host description that is an exact match for domains and “any connection”:

These descriptions match only when the user selects exactly the respective connection.

Example 2

To improve on Example 1 above, we can use the following three IAP connection descriptions:

Again, what Little Snitch shows depends on what the user selects:

To summarize: If a description’s Host is an exact match, only that single connection description’s Purpose and DenyConsequences will be shown. Otherwise, multiple matching descriptions may be shown.

Matching everything else

There’s one more case that the examples above did not cover: What should be shown if your app connects to arbitrary servers that you don’t know about in advance? For example, if you develop a web browser or file transfer app, it will connect to whatever servers the user enters and you couldn’t possibly know them when writing your app’s IAP. To show a connection description for these connections anyway, you can provide a fallback connection description:

Example 3

If you add the following description to Example 2 above…

… it will be shown whenever a connection is established to a server that is not covered by another connection description, e.g. www.apple.com. Without this description, no information from your app’s IAP would be shown for that connection.

Summary

Information of only one single connection description is shown in the following cases:

Otherwise, if one or more Domain connection descriptions match, information from all of them are shown, ordered by their relevance. Example: Host: *.example.com

Further, if a connection description with the Fallback Wildcard exists, its information is shown, i.e. Host: *

If no connection descriptions match, no connection-specific IAP information is shown.

Nested IAPs in XPC services, embedded frameworks, and other bundles

This section describes the behavior of Little Snitch 4.4 and later. The behavior of earlier versions of Little Snitch is described below

If an app contains an Internet Access Policy, Little Snitch will also search any XPC Services for an IAP. That means that if your app uses an XPC service, you can add an IAP to the .xpc bundle’s Resources folder and it will be merged with the app’s IAP automatically. This allows you to bundle the documentation with the executable that it actually describes.

For example:

The same is true for embedded frameworks, plug-ins, app extensions, and other kinds of loadable bundles that are located in one of the following directories inside the app bundle:

These directories are searched recursively. For example, if an XPC service has an IAP, the XPC service’s embedded bundles are searched, too, and so on.

You can use the placeholder %APPNAME% in localized strings of a nested IAP to refer to the enclosing app’s name. It will be substituted with the app name before being shown to the user.

Note that the value for the key ApplicationDescription is required for nested IAPs, too, but Little Snitch currently does not show it to the user.

Single executable applications

This feature is available starting in Little Snitch 4.3.3

Internet Access Policy as part of Info.plist

Single executable apps don’t have a bundle directory where an Internet Access Policy file can be deposited. However, they can have an Info.plist file embedded in the executable file. Since the Internet Access Policy is basically a property list, it can be be added to the embedded Info.plist. Just create an Internet Access Policy as described above, but instead of storing it in a separate file, add it to Info.plist under the top level key InternetAccessPolicy.

Localization without .lproj bundles

Having no bundle directory also affects localization. We support only one localization method for embedded Info.plist files, and that is analogous to the strings-file method explained above. Localizations are added at the key path InternetAccessPolicy.Localizations.<language> where <language> is the language name used for.lproj directories (e.g. en for English).

Example:

Key Type Value
▾ Root Dictionary (14 items)
▾ InternetAccessPolicy Dictionary (3 items)
ApplicationDescription String StringsKey1
▸ Connections Array (2 items)
▸ Services Array (2 items)
▾ Localizations Dictionary (2 items)
▾ en Dictionary (2 items)
StringsKey1 String EditHelper is part of myCompany’s text editing suite. It provides dictionary and spell checking services to other components.
StringsKey2 String EditHelper updates its dictionary from this server.
…

How to embed an Info.plist in an executable

The Info.plist file is included in a Mach object section in the __TEXT segment named __info_list. It can be added using the -sectcreate __TEXT __info_plist linker option. Fortunately, you don’t need to do this manually. Xcode can do it for you.

Open Xcode, select the target for your executable and go to the Build Settings. Search for Info.plist. There are two settings which are relevant for us:

(Legacy) Support for XPC services before Little Snitch 4.4

This section describes the legacy behavior of Little Snitch 4.0.5 up to, but excluding, Little Snitch 4.4

Using XPC services allows you to separate your app’s functionality into multiple processes for stability and privilege separation reasons.

Little Snitch treats connections established by an XPC service on behalf of an app as if the connection were established by the app itself. In fact, in most places Little Snitch doesn’t even prominently show to the user that an XPC service is in use. Also, rules are automatically created for just the app itself, instead of via-rules for “App via XPCService”.

Apps that bundle XPC services

If you are developing an app that bundles XPC services, there’s nothing special you have to do in regard to the Internet Access Policy.

Third-party XPC services

If you are developing an XPC service that other developers incorporate into their apps (e.g. as part of a third-party framework), you can provide an Internet Access Policy that describes only the connections of the XPC service. In this case, the files go into the XPC service bundle’s Resources directory.

If the developers who bundle your XPC service in their apps do not include an Internet Access Policy of their own, at least the connections established by your XPC service will be described.

But if the developers who bundle your XPC service in their apps do include their own Internet Access Policy in their app bundle, only that information will be used – the XPC service’s IAP will be ignored. This allows the developers who actually ship an app to have the last say over what information the Internet Access Policy shows to the user.

Because Little Snitch rules usually do not contain information about XPC services, Little Snitch cannot show an IAP that is contained inside an XPC service. This information will only be shown in the connection alert and Network Monitor where more information about the connecting processes is available.

Writing guidelines

Troubleshooting

If you bundled an Internet Access Policy with your app, but it does not seem to be used by Little Snitch, here are a few hints that can help you track down the problem.

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