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."

Re:Marketing?

[mikael_j]

Sounds like just about every large ISP I've had the "pleasure" of working with. A small ISP's president will go issue a press release saying "Lightning took out two of our DSLAMs last night but it will be fixed ASAP", they'll most likely also record an automated message informing customers calling tech support about this. A large ISP OTOH will most likely keep quiet as long as possible, then issue a small notice on their website stating "Some of our customers are currently experiencing technical difficulties, our intarweb experts are investigating the problem and hope to have it fixed soon" and no information to customers calling tech support other than "There are 173 customers ahead of you, the wait time is 2 hours and 12 minutes".

/Mikael

There are still some Apple-related talks left:

[secmartin]

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.

Solution:

[e4g4]

chmod go-w ~/Public/Drop\ Box

Admittedly - it is a problem, but it certainly has a workaround.

Re:Here's a serious flaw with FileVault

[bill_mcgonigle]

Here's another: You can't use Time Machine properly if you use FileVault. Backup or encryption, pick one.