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Two Black Hat Talks On Apple Security Cancelled
An anonymous reader writes "Two separate Apple security talks have been nixed at the last minute from next week's Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. The Washington Post's Security Fix blog reports that Apple researcher Charles Edge was to present on flaws in Apple's FileVault encryption plan, but asked Black Hat to cancel the talk, citing confidentiality agreements with Apple. Then on Friday, Apple pulled its security engineering team out of a planned public discussion on the company's security practices — which would have been a first for Apple. 'Marketing got wind of it, and nobody at Apple is ever allowed to speak publicly about anything without marketing approval,' a Black Hat spokesman said."
Sounds like the marketing policy is "pretend there are no security issues". Hey, it seems to work.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
From a managements and sharehold perspective I think it's quite normal and understandable of Apple creating such a policy.
A self-acclaimed public spokesperson respresenting your company about a subject without prior permission?
You must be a veteran here but new on the job market.
I guess, Apple is still very much old school; when it comes to admitting their mistakes. Or they just might believe in security thru obscurity. Either way this move, put them in the lime light even more. Great work marketing. Someone deserves to be fired...
preferred method should be beating to death by a stick.
My guess is you lack the upper body strength to pick up a stick.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
This must be bitter sweet for Steve B., since Apple likes to tout that it's software is more secure than Vista. I wonder if Walt Mossberg is taking note of this.
I think Steve J.'s brand of evil is about the same as MS's, but because they are perceived as underdogs, people don't care as much.
Apple's marketing is genius.
A few years back, they were talking up how FileVault (home folder encryption) uses AES-128 encryption, implying that it would take longer to crack than the age of the universe.
http://www.apple.com/sg/macosx/features/filevault/
Meanwhile, the password could often be found in plain text on the hard drive in swap files. This was back before encrypting swap was an option.
It's also funny how a company that sells itself as secure has root privilege escalation without a password as a feature out of the box.
http://www.apple.com/sg/macosx/features/security/
I guess the default account having root access is sort of an industry standard given Windows. Phrases like "wise architectural decisions" are relative, so not strictly false. I won't touch "intelligent design".
But saying, and I quote, "The Mac OS X administrator account, unlike the Windows admin account, disables access to the core functions of the operating system." is an outright lie (see above "root privilege escalation feature").
While it's pretty sad to hear that their security team is not allowed to speak, there are still two talks about Apple products left: Jesse Dâ(TM)Aguannoâ(TM)s talk about rootkits for OS X, and Petko D. Petkov who announced he might provide some details about a 0-day attack against Quicktime.
Rule #1: You do not talk about Apple flaws
Rule #2: You DO NOT talk about Apple flaws
Rule #3: If someone says "stop" or goes limp, taps out we make him the CEO
Rule #4: Only two sentences to an argument
Rule #5: One argument at a time
Rule #6: No punch, no daiquiris
Rule #7: Cover-ups will go on as long as they have to
Rule #8: If this is your first night at Apple flaws, you HAVE to swallow
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I'm not surprised really to see a corporation sponsored "Hacker" conference have talks canceled due to confidentiality agreements.
I've yet to hear a real hacker conference have their talks canceled due to something like that. Normally cancellations involve the speaker being escorted out in handcuffs.
But honestly there are far better, and more hacker-centric conferences out there than Black Hat. Conferences that come to mind are Chaos Communications Camp (or Chaos Communications Congress in the winter), Defcon, and even H.O.P.E. are far better choices than Black Hat.
There are more conferences out there that have the same "hacker spirit" but aren't as hard-core like NotaCon which has more of a social atmosphere to it.
But I digress, plan to see more of these types of cancellations at Black Hat in the future since the corporations just are looking for another excuse to line their pockets with more money. The fees for this Conference are astronomical, anywhere between $1300.00 to $5000.00 PER TALK compared to The Last H.O.P.E. where the price was ~$80.00 total as in you pay $80.00 and you get to go to EVERYTHING.
-VK
Well, of course! Apple is the underdog. Never mind the fact that is has the number one selling music player, and the market share is increasing, and that iTunes is extremely popular, and people are killing others for a iPhone...
Oh wait. Maybe Apple ISN'T the underdog. Maybe its practices are just the same as any other large company that wants to make a profit. It's no different from any others in that respect, in fact, it may be worse, as people excuse Apple for a lot, as they still think of it as the underdog.
1. Create two accounts on your mac. One is a throaway with fileVault turned on.
2. Log in to both and switch to your non FileVault account.
3. Copy a large enough chunk of data to the drop box of the FileVault user so that you will ALMOST fill up the boot drive.
4. Duplicate that data to another folder on your boot drive.
5. Wait till the hard drive fills up and you have 0 K on the drive.
6. Launch Safari and load a few web pages with lots of rotating ads. This is to guarantee that more data is being brought onto the hard drive.
At some point, the FileVault account becomes corrupted. You can't log in to it, you can't recover it. It's gone.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Apple makes pretty good products. But in some ways their business practices are worse than Microsofts. They are so secretive that it is scary. They add to it by attacking the PC industry and saying how their product is better but all they will give you for information is press releases. At least MS is finally being more open with want is going on in the background with things like Channel 9 and versus blogs. There is a line where you have to protect company interests but it shouldn't compromise the customers' ability to make an informed choice.
chmod go-w ~/Public/Drop\ Box
Admittedly - it is a problem, but it certainly has a workaround.
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein
The "marketing got wind of it" quote from the summary is attributed to the Blackhat organizer, not Apple's marketing department. There's you daily dose of slashdot bias for ya.