# Migration Assistant Migration Assistant is Apple’s macOS workflow for transferring accounts, applications, settings, and data from another Mac, backup, or startup disk. ## Transitional authority Migration is a high-authority continuity operation. It must read external or historical state, recreate identities and permissions, and write into a newly trusted system. That makes its daemons, scripts, environment variables, staging paths, and authorization checks a security boundary. [[CVE-2023-32369|Migraine]] demonstrated that systemmigrationd could pass an inheritable SIP-bypass entitlement to interpreter children. This did not make all migration activity malicious; it showed how lower-trust input could cross into Apple-entitled execution. ## Evidentiary boundary Presence of Migration Assistant, transferred files, or old account state does not establish compromise. Relevant evidence includes migration logs, process ancestry, entitlements, source identity, timestamps, and before-and-after protected paths. ## Relationships [[Account Migration]] · [[Identity Continuity]] · [[CVE-2023-32369]] · [[Perl]] · [[System Integrity Protection]]. ## Source [[InstallESD.dmg#Perl, hidden arguments, and Migraine|InstallESD.dmg — Migraine analysis]].