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Apple Asks Security Experts To Examine OS X Lion
An anonymous reader writes "For as much as Mac OS X has a reputation for being safer than Windows, security researchers won't hesitate to point out that the opposite is, in fact, true. But Apple's looking to change that. This past Thursday, Apple doled out a beta of OS X Lion to developers. In conjunction with that, Apple is also reaching out to noted security experts and offering them free previews of OS X 10.7 so that they can take a look at Apple's new security measures and reach back to Apple with any thoughts and concerns they might have. Indeed, Apple is becoming a lot more security conscious these days, not only in terms of reaching out to security researchers but also in its personnel hires."
as much as Mac OS X has a reputation for being safer than Windows, security researchers won't hesitate to point out that the opposite is, in fact, true.
I'm sorry, what? Windows is "safer" than OS X? "In fact"?
Every single year, OSX loses the Pwn2Own competition first. Windows and Linux always go down on the same day. No matter what version has been current, OSX has always been less secure than Windows when both are up to date on patches. If Apple changes its security culture, it could mean big things for Apple in corporate environments.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
It's not bad actually... You need a MacMini server x2 to replicate each other, and push out the managed settings. You can authenticate machines via AD/OD/OpenLDAP. You can host the home folders off any NFS/AFP server. Netboot, netrestore etc makes deploying easy.. I'm looking after 150 Macs at the moment, as well as a host of PC's, and I don't have many issues. It' s just me.
The wording is indeed poor. Charlie Miller (made famous by Pwn2Own, hacking OS X and iOS) has stated several times that OS X is not more secure than Windows, it is safer. Safer != Secure. He goes on to say he prefers OS X, and still recommends it over Windows. Would you rather be the guy wearing a bullet proof vest running into gun fire, or the guy wearing just a T-shirt, but not even in the same county? Until OS X reaches a level of market penetration that Windows has, it'll continue to be less attractive to hackers for profit. Sorry OS X users (myself included): our OS isn't the most secure out there. Security by obscurity isn't security.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/09/security-snow-leopard/
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/hack-windows-security-snow-leopard,8704.html
You're joking, right? Apple is historically months behind in patching publicly disclosed vulnerabilities in core libraries they share with other Unix-like systems (Samba and Java are two key examples). Overall code robustness is abysmal in any Apple product I've assessed--they fall over with trivial fuzzing or a few hours of analysis. They're an absolute pain in the ass to deal with when trying to resolve a responsibly reported vulnerability: they often don't seem to have qualified people triaging inbound reports, and when they do finally acknowledge the correct severity of a reported issue it can take years before they finally push out a fix. And to top it all off, their core security counter-measures (e.g. ASLR and NX) are useless as anything more than marketing fluff because they're not implemented consistently.
Seriously, I've been in the security field for almost 15 years and dealt with reporting vulnerabilities to dozens of companies. Microsoft is a pain to deal with because of their compatibility matrices and long release cycles, but they're generally competent. Whereas Apple is just an absolute train-wreck. The only reason every Mac isn't infested with malware is that they're not a big enough chunk of the market for it to be worth the effort. If they ever cross the magic 15% threshold they're in for a very rude awakening.
You mean, once the contest enters the phase where you can run a program remotely, people attack the Mac first, because they want to win the Mac, and Windows and Linux are successfully attacked minutes later.
No, he means exactly what he said. OSX is less secure then Windows. Charlie Miller (the guy who takes down the Macs first) has mentioned this in an interview here. While Apple has improved their security, they are still behind Windows.
Many pundits have made a lot of the fact that the Mac was the first to be exploited in the Pwn2Own contest. Was the choice of the Mac as the first target because the hardware/operating system combo was more desirable as a prize than the commodity Windows laptops of the other competitors? Or was it just because Macintosh exploits occur with much less frequency than Windows exploits and would therefore be more newsworthy?
So until this year, applications on Apple were way easier to exploit than Windows. This is because Apple had weak ASLR and no DEP while Windows had full ASLR and DEP. This year, Snow Leopard has DEP, so its no longer trivial to exploit. In fact, I have lots of bugs in Safari that I easily could have exploited on Leopard but will be very difficult on Snow Leopard. So it used to be that that it was much worse, but now its mostly comparable (although still slightly behind)
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
It is disappointing to see the comments thus far have not bothered to mention what potential security improvements are likely to be in the final version of Lion and how effective they might be. So far the ones I've heard mentioned include:
I'm sure in more security oriented forums there will be some good analysis of these new features, how well implemented they are, and how effective they are likely to be. The Mac App Store offers some potential security improvements by standardizing application updates and pushing them out more quickly and widely and hopefully encouraging developers to make more use of security frameworks already present. Personally, I think the sandboxing combined with the Mac App Store could be a huge boon to security if Apple can get enough developers on board, but I'm not sure if Apple will go that route. Hopefully feedback from experts will help push them in that direction.
Apple's problem in corporate environments is there complete and utter lack of understanding and support of a real enterprise. They want to play make believe at enterprise support but they don't take it seriously. It is a disaster and only getting worse. We've been looking at integrating Macs in to a lab (and we are going to) but will need 3rd party software to make it work well.
Some big noteworthy things they've done recently are discontinue servers and screw over virtualization. So you can't buy a blade server, the most popular kind of server, for Macs anymore. You can buy a Mac mini, an overpriced tiny little desktop thing ($1000 for a Core 2 Duo server box) and use that, or you can buy a Mac Pro tower. That's it. No rack servers. Ya that is real enterprise support.
In terms of virtualization VMWare fully supports OS-X server, client tools and all... However Apple won't license it to run on anything but Mac hardware. So if you want Mac VM servers you have to buy a Mac Pro tower and find a place to put that, then get VMWare Fusion on it, which is a desktop solution, not a server one, then virtualize OS-X server on that. That Big rack of high availability, bare-metal ESXi servers that you run Windows, Linux, etc on? Nope, fuck you can't run OS-X on it because Apple says so.
Apple will never get big in corporate environments until they get real with enterprise support. Not half assed solutions, real support.
True.
IIS and SQL Server injections were on the rise when Solaris was still king of the internet server market a decade ago. Windows Server back then was not the dominant player yet had most of the backdoors. The reason Windows has more viruses and trojans is due to activeX and shoddy design for IE and Windows. Not because it was the dominant client operating system.
I would mod you up if I had points. I have been refuting this until I am blue in the face.
It has nothing to do with popularity. Fact is in 1999 all you had to do was wrote a few lines of code in C++ to do a delete a partition and put it in an ocx container for activeX and voila! Anyone visiting your site lost their hard drive! Yes security was that bad in the 1990s with Windows.
http://saveie6.com/