Thinking about the differences between macOS and Gnome keyrings, I began to wonder… how does macOS know what the app making the access is? It obviously can’t be by the filesystem path, or malware could steal keys by naming itself aws-vault and sneaking into the keychain.
According to this Stack Overflow answer, Apple is using the app’s bundle ID to determine this, authenticated by code signing.
That’s an infrastructure that doesn’t really exist on Linux. Each distro signs its packages, but the on-disk artifacts are generally neither signed nor checked. That turns it into a much larger problem for Gnome Keyring to tie secrets to individual apps, because first, we’d need to build a secure way to identify apps.
And then, culturally, Linux users would reject anything resembling a central authority. Developers (including me) don’t usually bother even using GPG for decentralized code signing, and that’s not even an option with the fashionable curl|bash style installers.
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