Brian Cross

Q: What is the aspd process?

I'm connecting to a VPN, and I'm also using Little Snitch v3. Every time I connect, I get a popup from Little Snitch asking me for permission to let a process called aspd connect to the VPN's servers. I can't find out what this is, so I usually just temporarily deny it. Is it something critically important? Should I always allow aspd to connect to whatever  it wants, or can I permanently deny it without any ill effects?

iMac (21.5-inch Late 2009), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2), 4GB RAM

Posted on Oct 22, 2012 6:50 PM

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Q: What is the aspd process?

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  • by Librarians Unite,

    Librarians Unite Librarians Unite May 28, 2016 4:34 AM in response to Brian Cross
    Level 1 (9 points)
    Mac OS X
    May 28, 2016 4:34 AM in response to Brian Cross

    Today on my Mac running OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Little Snitch intercepted a connection request from the apsd process, so I went to Google to find out what "apsd" is, and I found this thread. I have been using this Mac (and Little Snitch) for six months and I don't recall seeing a connection request from the apsd process before. In my case, what is new is that I recently set up an iCloud account on my Mac, including an iCloud e-mail account in Mail.app. In the six prior months, I had been using my Mac without iCloud. As you probably know, iCloud e-mail accounts use push notifications. As noted above, "apsd" stands for Apple Push Notification Service daemon. Since I never saw a connection request from the apsd process until I set up an iCloud account on my Mac, I suspect the apsd traffic is exclusively iCloud-related in my case.

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