Mac Developer Mulls Zero-day Security Response 94
1.6 Beta writes "Landon Fuller, the Mac programmer/Darwin developer behind the 'month of Apple fixes' project, plans to expand the initiative to roll out zero-day patches for issues that put Mac OS X users at risk of code execution attacks. The former engineer in Apple's BSD Technology Group has already shipped a fix for a nasty flaw in Java's GIF image decoder and hints an an auto-updating mechanism for the third-party patches. The article quotes him as saying, 'Perhaps [it could be] the Mac OS equivalent to ZERT,' referring to the Zero-day Emergency Response Team."
Re:no trolls?! (Score:5, Interesting)
MOAB includes hack attempt [isfym.com]
Re:no trolls?! (Score:5, Interesting)
When fanbois and anti-fanbois come into contact they emit a special radiation that causes a temporal shift, known informally as "a colossal total waste of time", for anyone who happens to be reading or listening. For example, you're reading a technical thread, then two of these subsentient particles come into contact. They insist on threadjacking your discussion into an us versus them discussion that only tangentially involves the subject at hand and is logically irritating since it represents a false dilemma [wikipedia.org]. As you skip past the messages looking for some meaningful discussion and swearing about the state of technical discourse, you suddenly discover two hours have passed due to the temporal-moronic radiation.
Maybe people could study training Bayesian filters to delete those messages (or just delete the authors).
bo-oh-oh-oh-oh-gus! (Score:5, Interesting)
Although I agree that a Mac OS X worm would be bad publicity for Apple, and that Apple could improve the way they handle response to reported security defects, I think they have produced a reasonable track record over the past five years regarding the basic security of Mac OS X. Apple's security track record is due much more to the relatively weaker security of Windows systems than to Windows market dominance. Windows is low hanging fruit, crack-wise. If it were harder to own Windows systems, crackers would switch to Mac OS X in a flash. Crackers don't need to own 20 million systems, they really only need a few thousand at a time.
Re:arrogance (Score:3, Interesting)
I can assure you that is not the case. I consider myself a Linux user above all else. As for the arrogance, I can only speak about those I've come in contact with, which is mainly here on slashdot. It seems that every post about OS X security or Apple's business practices ends with "but-but-but Windows!". That comes off as arrogant to me. I know there are plenty of exceptions. Just don't claim that I feel burned by Microsoft (see what I mean?) and I'm lashing out. I've made a living off a picking Windows security apart. They've been nothing but good for my business.
Re:no trolls?! (Score:4, Interesting)
BTW it didn't "try" to crash Safari, the default/preinstalled browser of an operating system, a tabbed browser. It actually froze it. It is again, not a security issue but could be a good troll tool.
IMHO if nobody has seen true face of these idiots, they should have seen on day 29.
ps: That JP2 is bad for OS X Finder too, don't keep it in your disk or don't browse that folder with Finder/Path Finder,whatever uses Kakadu jp2 lib.
Good idea, but needs support it won't get (Score:3, Interesting)
You'd think that this kind of hand-in-hand cooperation would be a no-brainer, but I doubt it. Companies (here's looking right at Apple) still just haven't wrapped their heads around the open exchange of ideas; they are afraid that admitting flaws makes them -look- bad. Ewwww, poor coders. But in reality I think everyone who uses computers by this point in time KNOWS flaws happen...it isn't that they will happen, it has become what are you gonna do about it? And it is pure arrogance by the OS vendors to think that neither the community has the ability to create these patchs nor that the users/admins are interested in them.
Really this is a thing that OS vendors should aspire to, integrating this kind of response mechanism into their existing Software Update suite would be a Good Thing.
Re:This is not a "move on Apple's part" (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's drop the cognitive dissonance, shall we?
Vint Cerf recently made a report to the UN committee on internet security. He said that maybe 25% of all computers tied to the internet are infected. We're currently seeing the highest spam levels in the history of the internet, much of which is being sent by botnets that contain thousands or hundreds of thousands of compromised machines. We've gotten to a point in history where 'hundreds of thousands of machines compromised' is no longer a newsworthy fact. It's so freaking common that people just look at it as an unpleasant fact of life.
And right in the middle of that context we have a few tens of millions of Macs that have been running unmolested for years.
I don't give a damn about your abstractions. I don't give a damn about your heuristics. I don't give a damn about your moral indignation that Apple doesn't run its entire business in a way that's consistent with the .3 seconds of what passes for thought that you've put into any given issue. I'm an empericist. I care about what's actually happened.
What's actually happened is that there hasn't been a single large-scale compromise of the Mac platform since the introduction of OS X. What's actually happened is that Apple has been notified of several vulnerabilities over the past few years and has rolled out security updates to address them. In many cases, they've also listed the names of the people who notified them of the problem. What's actually happened is that Apple has continued to develop its security model and has built a whole new set of tools into Leopard that will make OS X even more secure than it is today.
There are exactly three classes of people who try to bang the "Macs are no more secure than Windows, but Mac users are too stupid to care" drum any more:
Please note that I do not place Landon Fuller in any of those categories. He isn't trying to sell the world the idea that Apple's sky is falling. He's talking about a fairly interesting concept of community involvement in the overall Apple security process.
I happen to disagree with the idea, personally.. IMO the chance of a zero-day patch breaking something is higher than the chance of a Mac getting infected between day zero and the time Apple releases an official patch (and yes, that includes all those issues that have been hanging out there unpatched for years.. show me the number of active exploits in the wild instead of just stuffing another set of panties into the wad currently wedged up your ass). I also see problems with trust and vetting. A MacZERT would presumably do some QA on the patches before distributing them, which leads to the same kinds of delays you get from Apple. And a MacZERT's capacity to look for unwanted side effects would be limited by the fact that outside third parties don't have all the relevant code.
I do see the possibility of large benefits from a community effort to isolate and develop proposed solutions to bugs, since that would help Apple's own security team with some of the heavy lifting. I think Apple could develop a good dialogue with the third-party security community through such a system.
But that has absolutely nothing to do with you. You're just another anti-fanboy out to spew meaningless FUD. The fact that you can't distinguish between "hundreds of thousands of compromised machines in a single botnet" and "no exploit of even a thousand machines over the past five years" means your opinion is too stupid to be taken seriously.