Disable Back to My Mac in Mavericks

[adkinsan]

As part of our hardening of Macs, we've been asked to remove the Back to My Mac feature, and ensure that it doesn't communicate. Of course, the appropriate firewalls rules are in place, but the request was made to disable it at the local level.

After some testing, we found that removal of two files seems to fill resolve the request: /usr/sbin/awacsd /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com/apple/awacsd.plist

Testing thus far has not unturned any downside of removing these files, other than an error message from the Back To My Mac check box within the iCloud Preference that reports back an error "iCloud server not responding."

Please let me know if your experience is otherwise.

[c0n0r]

I always hesitate to delete files from the system.

As it is a launch daemon... I would think that a better option would be to just set the disabled flag on it:
sudo launchctl unload -w "/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.awacsd.plist"

I'm sure you could set a Casper policy or MCX to enforce that setting.