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Windows vs Mac Security
sdhorne writes "There is a good technical discussion over at InfoWorld on the merits of launchd and what is lacking in a comparable Windows secure solution. It is a throw back to the UNIX vs Windows security discussion that has been hashed out for many years." From the article: "it always traces back to Microsoft's untenable policy of maintaining gaps in Windows security to avoid competing with 3rd party vendors and certified partners. Apple's taking a different approach: What users need is in the box: Anti-virus, anti-spam, encryption, image backup and restore, offsite safe storage through .Mac, and launchd. Pretty soon any debate with Microsoft over security can be ended in one round when Apple stands up, says 'launchd', and sits back down."
Pretty soon any debate with Microsoft over security can be ended in one round when Apple stands up, says 'launchd', and sits back down."
It seemed pretty wello written. That said, I which he would have said a little more about launchd, at least enough to explain why it gives OSX an advantage. It would have also been nice to have had some kind of side-by side comparing Windows and OSX, like how the windows System pseudo-user trumps the admin user, and how there is not way to trump the OSX root user.
Why this can't happen under OS X:
I don't know if I'd go that far. OSX isn't 100% immune - it just has more common sense.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Apple's taking a different approach: What users need is in the box: Anti-virus, anti-spam, encryption, image backup and restore, offsite safe storage through.
Don't you think that if Microsoft offered this that everyone would cry monopoly? Actually, I've seen other people on Slashdot cry this before at the announcement of Microsoft's OneCare program, which isn't even bundled with the OS!
If you don't count a trojan as a virus, then you don't need an anti-virus if your OS is secure. Apple can work on securing its OS or on an anti-trojan, but any effort spent on an anti-virus is wasted.
Conceptually, I agree that LaunchD is a really slick idea and I really hope Linux and the BSDs take a good hard look at this code and the possibility of adopting it. That said, it is not a security panacea by any means, just one more clean, sensible implementation that leaves less room for a vulnerability. The thing that makes me hesitate to laud this feature, however, is the implementation. Apple has a lot of smart people working for them and a lot of old school UNIX geeks to whom secure programming is as natural as breathing. They also have a lot of coders and managers who realize that OS X is not a primarily security minded OS. Sure, it is better than Windows and on par with a desktop Linux distro, but it isn't a locked down OpenBSD install or a super secure Linux distro. They don't focus their efforts on security and it shows sometimes when they introduce new code. LaunchD replaces a number of time tested bits of code and while it is (IMHO) a much cleaner, nicer design I haven't a clue about how well written and tested it is, especially from a security perspective. I'd feel a lot better about claiming it as a security feature if I knew some white hats had pounded on it for a while and exposed anything Apple did not bother to think of. I'd feel a lot better if the OSS community in general jumped on it and adopted it, thus helping with this security testing and adding more eyes.
I like LaunchD. I like OS X as a desktop. Lets just not get carried away here with random claims about security. OS X is inherently more secure than Windows, but that really isn't saying a lot. I'm not willing to just assume LaunchD is secure in and of itself, let alone that it will play a big part in securing the OS as a whole.
[..]say that as the Mac gains a larger market share, the number of viruses available for it will grow. I think this is of little consequence.[..] The permissions system means that a common virus could damage a user's home directory, but the system for the most part would remain unaffected, including other users [..] and most of all the fact that users don't run as administrators, all of these reasons make it much less likely that viruses could be as damaging as on Windows
I think this is thinking too much from the perspective of old-school "format c:" destructive virusses.
Today's malware isn't purely destructive anymore; in fact, little incentive exists to create a virus that merely destroys stuff.
Today we're seeing worms that are used to send spam or perform DDOS attacks, and ransomware that encrypts your files and will only unlock them after you pay up.
Access to a user's home directory is perfectly adequate for ransomware. Access to networkresources is sufficient to turn your computer into a zombie. Privileged system access is not the holy grail; access to specific resources are.
User-based security offers no protection against this. Instead people often install programs to limit access to, for example, network resources - a software firewall that will inspect a process to see if it's legit before letting it use the network. Likewise we will need a security subsystem that prevent programs to write to files not created by them. For example; firefox should be able to upload a word document (read permissions) perhaps, but surely only word or openoffice should be permitted to (over)write it.
This is more along the lines of capabilities, but it could be grafted onto user-based security systems (just run processes as different users and give those users permissions only to write to their own files and/or read from their own directories, with some exceptions (e.g. the filemanager)).
Todays programs are so flexible and scriptable, not to mention just plain big and unverifiable, let alone complex and exploitable, that simply saying 'these programs have been deemed safe by an administrator, so they can access all your files if you run them' is no longer an adequate means of making sure applications stay within bounds. We really need to make programs stay on their own turf. Not just files; how about that registry? Why the hell should every program be able to read all of it, and write almost all of it, even keys that belong to a different program?
It's not just windows; MacOS lacks such stuff at the moment too (though it will undoubtedly be much easier to integrate into it than into Windows). Really only SE Linux is set up to handle this sort of thing.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
And Apple could never do the things Microsoft does:
1) Threaten Compaq with withholding OS licenses if Compaq installed Netscape Navigator as the default browser
2) Threaten IBM with increased OS license fees if IBM did not drop OS/2
Those were the lynchpins of the antitrust lawsuit. If Microsoft had ONLY bundled, they would not face monopoly abuse charges. Then HP could have UNBUNDLED IE and installed Firefox, or IBM could have unbundled Windows and installed OS/2.
Apple's bundles can be unbundled. That is the critical difference. Drag Safari, Mail, Virex, Appleworks, iCal, and Quicktime to the trash, and the OS still works.
GPL Deconstructed
In reality, this is not an important distinction for home users. I don't know about you, but I don't care a whole lot about by system, I can re-install everything without too much trouble. Replacing years of digital family photograghs, financial records, etc. in my home directory? Impossible. This is why I backup my home directly regularly, but don't bother with the system.
When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost, you mourn for yourself. - Harpo Marx
What I thought was interesting in the article was how many of his complaints were probably due not to bad design per se, but to poor practices -- things like documentation, structural transparency, consistent use of system policies, etc.
What struck me is that there are definitely seeming flaws in Windows that make it insecure as-is, but that it doesn't have to be this way; Microsoft has chosen and continues to choose to operate in such a way that exacerbates rather than minimizes the effect of many of the inherent weaknesses of the platform. A similarly designed system, managed and documented differently, would probably be less problematic.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Mac is not dramatically more secure through launchd...
It is simple really. Six years into OS X, growing market share, and no viruses in the wild.
First principle. No ports open by default. Macs ship with a closed box. Plug it into the Internet, wait, and your machine will never get infected simply because it is not listening on any port, and no attacker has any foothold to get into the box. Over the years Windows has shipped with a wide variety of open ports, whether they be for netbios, smbd, messenger, IIS (on NT), or others. Many of these have been launching pads for viruses and worms.
Second principle. Design the OS from the ground up to support privilege descalation. That is, make it so that every action on the machine is executed with User privileges or less, unless you really need more privilege. Launchd is a part of this. On Windows, you still have ActiveX with escalatable privilege, and people get infected from web surfing or opening email.
That is really all it takes. Make it so a user cannot compromise the OS trivially, and there are no open ports, and you made a box as secure as a Mac. Once you start opening ports, you need to know what you are doing or you will be 0wn3d by some script kiddy. Make it secure by default, and force the user to take positive action to do anything that is a potential security problem (like installing executables from random places on the internet).