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Apple Adds Memory Randomization To Leopard
.mack notes a ZDNet blog outlining some of the security features added to OSX Leopard (10.5). Here's Apple's brief description of all 11 new security features. "Apple has announced plans to add code-scrambling diversity to Mac OS X Leopard, a move aimed at making the operating system more resilient to virus and worm attacks. The security technology, known as ASLR (address space layout randomization), randomly arranges the positions of key data areas to prevent malware authors from predicting target addresses. Another new feature coming in Leopard is Sandboxing (systrace), which limits an application's access to the system by enforcing access policies for system calls."
Even Vista has a not-completely-broken implementation of ASLR. Linux, of course, has been doing it for years...
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
Currently no viable solution exists on a Windows box. There are things like Sunbird and Yagoon but they don't work well with Outlook (i.e. no real integration). Currently there is a project called Open Connector that exists to bring caldav support to Outlook. It is quickly reaching beta but the main developer needs help. I am pitching in and hope that others will as well. Check it out at http://www.openconnector.org./
Also, the calendar server that is used in Leopard is nothing more than the open-source Darwin calendar server at http://trac.calendarserver.org/projects/calendarserver
So, although nothing exists in ports that I can find you can run the Darwin calendar server on FreeBSD.
"I reject your reality and substitute my own!"
The OS knows where it's bits and pieces are and anyone using published API's will be fine; it's rather transparent to the programmer. Where you'll run afoul is if you are trying to directly access a 'known' code entry point illicitly, without going through the proper channels via the OS. This is why it is a step that can help prevent some types of attacks.
It's still a bandaid though, just as it is in every other OS that's implemented it (pretty much everything OTHER than OS X has a form of this already).
Eventually? Look back at the past! IBM System/390 mainframes (and the zSeries derived from it) have all those features in hardware. Array overrun? Hardware exception. Integer overflow? Hardware exception. Touch memory you deallocated? Hardware exception. ALU produces a spurious result? System picks it up because it runs all the code on at least two cores, and the same fault is unlikely to occur in two cores simultaneously - operation is retried on two more cores to determine which of the two original cores was correct, and the failing core is taken out of service.
You know why we don't do all that in hardware in PCs? Because it requires a huge amount of silicon. Sure, it's great. You learn good programming practices, because you can't get away with slipping even a little. But it costs a lot, gets hot, and goes slow. PCs are meant to be a good enough and cheap enough solution - not necessarily the best solution.
As far as I can tell, even the Linux kernel doesn't have memory randomization. You need a patch like PaX to get that feature.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Nice to hear those Microsoft people are about to catch up with the Java sandbox model from 1997
You be glad to read that Leopard makes connecting to network shares a threaded operation, so the spinning beachballs in finder related to this issue should be far fewer. In theory.
I've never had any problems plugging a Firewire driving into a Mac. Sure that something's not dodgy at your end?
Another new feature coming in Leopard is Sandboxing (systrace), which limits an application's access to the system by enforcing access policies for system calls
Folks,
Just FYI, the sandboxing in Leopard is not systrace. Systrace is vulnerable to race conditions -- see Robert Watson's paper "Exploiting Concurrency Vulnerabilities in System Call Wrappers". I asked him about this at WWDC, and he told me that Leopard's sandboxing is based on a different technology and is not vulnerable to the same attacks.
--Paul
Seems like you might have some issues - I plug firewire drives into Tiger systems multiple times per day and have never had a crash. And even if it did, you'd get the multi-lingual "please restart" screen - I haven't seen OSX do a black screen panic since 10.1 ...
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Also, if applications are "just vanishing" on launch, you may have disabled the little popup that tells you the 'application quit, wrote a crash log, and would you like to reopen it?'
When mac software crashes it usually just vanishes, with no user feedback at all. When the OS crashes it blackscreens (like, say, plugging in a firewire drive into Tiger, which they *still* haven't fixed) but I wouldn't say the information it gives is useful at all.. about as useful as a bluescreen.
Huh? When most Mac apps crash it produces that "The Application [ApplicationName] has quit unexpectedly" crashlog dialog box, where it shows you a trace and you can choose to type a friendly little note in and send it away to Apple. this thing.
I don't see it that frequently but I did find a pattern of actions that would repeatedly crash Aperture the other day, and it popped that thing up every time.
Don't know whether it only comes up for Apple applications or what (I don't think so; I remember getting it a few times when Vuescan crashed). Maybe it only comes up as a result of some types of faults, and not all of the fatal ones. But it seems to work fairly well for me.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
"DVD Player.app won't skip past things that the movie studios put on the DVD..."
True. In order to license the codecs and software needed to play DVDs legally a DVD Player has to honor the DVD player spec, which means honoring the stupid "operation not allowed" messages embedded in the DVDs.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.