Fixing Repeating iTunes Firewall Prompt
Published on 2 Dec 2011 · Filed in Tutorial · 330 words (estimated 2 minutes to read)As part of a comprehensive security strategy for my Mac—I don’t believe that Macs are automatically invulnerable to security threats—I use multiple host-based firewalls, including the Mac OS X application-level firewall found in System Preferences (this is in addition to Little Snitch and ipfw). However, recently I started noticing that every time I launched iTunes, it would prompt me for whether or not I wanted to allow iTunes to accept incoming network connections.
It wasn’t as much that iTunes was prompting me, as I knew why the application wanted to accept connections and had already taken steps at the BSD layer (using ipfw to limit connections on the appropriate ports). Rather, it was the fact that it kept prompting me, over and over. So, I did a bit of searching, and found the answer. I don’t recall exactly where I found the answer, so I can’t provide attribution here (sorry), but here’s the information.
First, use the codesign utility (a handy little tool to verify code signatures) to see if iTunes has been modified/damaged/corrupted in some way:
codesign -v --verbose /Applications/iTunes.app
If iTunes is fine, then you’ll get a response like this:
/Applications/iTunes.app: valid on disk
/Applications/iTunes.app: satisfies its Designated Requirement
However, if you’re experiencing the same problem that I was experiencing, you’ll probably get a response different than the one above. Your message will say something to the effect that iTunes is invalid on disk and is missing a required component (or something along those lines; I didn’t capture a screenshot with the exact message—sorry).
If that’s the case, here’s the fix:
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Download the iTunes installation package from Apple again. You’ll find it at http://www.apple.com/itunes or similar.
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Delete iTunes from the /Applications folder.
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Reboot (it might be sufficient to just logout and log back in again).
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Re-install iTunes.
After you’ve reinstalled iTunes, run codesign again to ensure that iTunes is reporting OK. Then, set the settings in the System Preferences Firewall GUI, and you should be good to go!