Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure

allthatiswrong.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 134 posts

Re: OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure

#81

Post by speleding »

Apple did one thing very well: they ask for a password when doing something potentially harmful, but made sure that the password popup is rare enough that you won't be trained to blindly fill it in.

That one thing has more security value than any of the advanced security techniques listed in the article like "stack canaries" and "fine grained ACL".

It's too bad there are so many security consultants that focus on the technology instead of user behaviour. If they would just look at the statistics they'd see that >90% of security issues are not technology issues, they are behavioural issues.

Sure, it would be nice to have a few of those advanced security techniques in OS X if they don't cause too much usability or performance issues, but it will have very little effect on security as a whole.

Re: OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure

#82

Post by [deleted] »

seabee wrote: post #73
X-Istence wrote: post #6

> The Unix Design is significantly less granular than that of Windows, not even having a basic ACL. The UNIX design came from a time when security was less of an issue and not taken as seriously as it did, and so does the job adequately. Windows NT (and later OSes) were actually designed with security in mind and this shows. This comparison doesn't even make sense, comparing a decades old UNIX design to a comparative…

"[Unix permissions] were much better than what was available in Windows for the longest time"? Try DOS. Windows 1.0 - Me were never multi-user operating systems, which was largely the purpose of having permissions, until the world realised just what a mistake it is to have full, unguarded permission to your system files. MS's first multi-user OS was Windows NT in 1993, which shipped with ACLs.

[deleted]

Re: OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure

#83

Post by there »

gonzo wrote: post #54
zdw wrote: post #2

They often share vulnerabilities with core libraries in other UNIX like systems with samba and java being two examples. Good thing that Lion jettisons both (Samba for going GPLv3, and Java is non-core download) The firewall functionality in OS X is impressive, but hardly utilized. The underlying technology is ipfw Also changed in Lion, which now uses OpenBSD's pf. Apple doesn't make much more use of it though. It has…

OpenBSD's pf? I highly doubt that Jordan Hubbard took the OpenBSD tree's variant. More likely it came directly from FreeBSD. (Yes, I know that 'pf' started on OpenBSD.)

what have freebsd contributed to pf?

Re: OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure

#84

Post by comex »

speleding wrote: post #81

Apple did one thing very well: they ask for a password when doing something potentially harmful, but made sure that the password popup is rare enough that you won't be trained to blindly fill it in. That one thing has more security value than any of the advanced security techniques listed in the article like "stack canaries" and "fine grained ACL". It's too bad there are so many security consultants that focus on the…

However, you only need the password if you want to be root, and most of the stuff malware wants to do (including keylogging, which the article mentions; requiring root to intercept keyboards is only moderately useful if the regular user can gdb -p whatever app has the password field) does not require being root.

Re: OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure

#85

Post by adsr »

Is it only me who find it funny that the name is allthatiswrong given how many factual errors there are in there. :) Can't quite make up mind if the author is trolling or if he have just failed to read up on the topic he tries to school us in.

Re: OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure

#86

Post by there »

X-Istence wrote: post #6

> The Unix Design is significantly less granular than that of Windows, not even having a basic ACL. The UNIX design came from a time when security was less of an issue and not taken as seriously as it did, and so does the job adequately. Windows NT (and later OSes) were actually designed with security in mind and this shows. This comparison doesn't even make sense, comparing a decades old UNIX design to a comparative…

on a unix server, you have to be root to read everyone's data.

on an os x laptop, you can be the logged-in user and read everyone's data. file permissions don't really mean much when everything of importance on the system is owned by one user (which is running dozens of applications with large attack surfaces).

that's not really a criticism of mac os, because it's the same on a windows desktop. you need elevated privileges on both systems to be able to do certain things to the system, but if all you want to do is steal sensitive documents, spy on the system's webcam, launch DDoS scripts, or add a command to the startup/login sequence, there's no need to bother elevating privileges.

one way to fix that problem is to make the system actually use the file permissions and user separation that the system already has, so that safari is running as a separate user with no access to the operating user's home directory, and that itunes has no access to the machine's webcam.

i haven't really looked into the sandbox feature of lion, but i'm assuming it does pretty much that, just like ios' concept of each 3rd party application being segregated from each other and not able to read files it's not supposed to.

Re: OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure

#88

Post by jfb »

vogonj wrote: post #64
jfb wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a former Apple engineer, I can confidently say that, while Jobs is the putative boss of everyone in the company, 99.9% of Apple engineers will never cross paths with him. I know a fair few people at Microsoft, and elsewhere, and I've never seen evidence that the engineering talent distribution at Apple is really all that different from the talent distribution anywhere else. There are superstars and dolts in the ex…

yeah, this lines up with my external perception as well, and the same is generally true of steveb at Microsoft; the only time I or most of my teammates ever see him is at the Company Meeting every year, and occasionally at engineering town halls. that said, Steve Jobs seems (at least from external appearances) to have far more thorough top-down control over the company's engineering efforts than Steve Ballmer does; t…

Looking in from the outside, I would hazard a guess that Microsoft is more Balkanized than Apple; there are many more products and the successful ones have been around for quite a while, allowing groups to pick up political capital that just isn't available, or rather, is expended differently at Apple.

Re: OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure

#89

Post by xtreegold »

vogonj wrote: post #62
xtreegold wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ballmer certainly looks like a great boss, having great care for good engineering practices such as yelling, throwing chairs at people and being generally obnoxious. Also, user experience is a part of good engineering.

Steve Jobs certainly looks like a great boss, calling the entire MobileMe team into an all-hands and asking them point blank why the fuck their software doesn't work. http://news.softpedia.com/news/Steve-Jobs-Not-Shy-of-Using-t... we can both play this game all day. user experience is indeed a part of good engineering, but it's not the be-all and end-all, and eventually you will /always/ run into a place where you mu…

Maybe you can shed some light on this doubt I've always had:

why does the UAC need to gray/black out all the display?

It's such a mess, especially when you have more than one monitor. Is there a technical reason or is it just UX?

Re: OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure

#90

Post by xtreegold »

vogonj wrote: post #62
xtreegold wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ballmer certainly looks like a great boss, having great care for good engineering practices such as yelling, throwing chairs at people and being generally obnoxious. Also, user experience is a part of good engineering.

Steve Jobs certainly looks like a great boss, calling the entire MobileMe team into an all-hands and asking them point blank why the fuck their software doesn't work. http://news.softpedia.com/news/Steve-Jobs-Not-Shy-of-Using-t... we can both play this game all day. user experience is indeed a part of good engineering, but it's not the be-all and end-all, and eventually you will /always/ run into a place where you mu…

About the rest, I wasn't praising Jobs as a great boss, just noting your equivalent isn't something to be proud of.

And I disagree that you will always need to compromise between good engineering and good UX, for example you can certainly have ASLR and DEP with the same UX OS X currently has, they don't add any burden on the user.

Of course sometimes you need to compromise, but it's not everytime.

Post reply on HN