macOS Catalina authentication

I operate as a NON-ADMIN user on my Macs. Etcher prompted me for a PASSWORD before flashing a USB. I tried entering the ADMIN password first, but it REJECTED that. I then entered my NON-ADMIN password. Etcher did nothing… it just sat there & looked back at me 😃

Took the same ISO over to my macOS 10.14.6, Etcher prompts for BOTH username and password, then proceeds to flash correctly.

wtf, o??

• Etcher version: Version 1.5.79 (1.5.79)

• Operating system and architecture: macOS 10.15.3 Model Name: MacBook Pro Model Identifier: MacBookPro16,1 Processor Name: 8-Core Intel Core i9 Processor Speed: 2.3 GHz Number of Processors: 1 Total Number of Cores: 8 L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB L3 Cache: 16 MB Hyper-Threading Technology: Enabled Memory: 64 GB

• Image flashed: linuxmint-19.3-cinnamon-64bit.iso

• Do you see any meaningful error information in the DevTools?

NO

[seamusdemora]

I don’t know when - or how - this happened, but Etcher now works on my macOS Catalina system. The “About” window indicates the version is 1.7.9, but it actually began working (again) some time ago. Posting this to say “Thanks” to the Balena Etcher team 😃

FWIW:

I am prompted to enter a password, but I use my non-admin user password & all works fine.

Also, I’ve just looked, and found this “Removable Volume” permission set for Etcher. Perhaps it’s been there all along, but I don’t recall seeing it - or setting it ¯_(ツ)_/¯ :

[lurch]

First of all: I don’t work on Etcher, and I don’t have a Mac, so these are largely all guesses… (but maybe theses guesses will be helpful anyway? 😕 )

From what I’ve been reading in various Etcher issues, it sounds like MacOS has both “admin accounts” and “non admin accounts”? In versions of MacOS prior to Catalina, Etcher used the “system elevation mechanism” (via @jorangreef 's sudo-prompt ) which then prompts for both a username and password, and people running as a non-admin user would then enter their admin-username and admin-password into the prompt, and Etcher would then gain full access. However in MacOS Catalina this “system elevation mechanism” (?) stopped working, and so Etcher was changed to instead display a custom password-prompt, which then runs sudo as the currently-running user (this comment shows what the different password prompts look like). I guess this works fine for everyone who’s running as an admin-user, but doesn’t work for people like @seamusdemora who are running on Catalina as a non-admin user? And I also guess that @zvin and @thundron are always running as admin-users, which is maybe why they never saw this issue themselves?

AFAICT these are all “security restrictions” introduced in MacOS Catalina by Apple, so there’s not really anything that Etcher can do to work around them? 🤷‍♂️ This comment says that even PrivilegedHelperTools (whatever they are) don’t work in Catalina either.