Thinking Securely

Macintosh users have not had to worry much about security matters. Previous versions of the Macintosh Operating System were quite difficult to harm from the outside. In fact, there have been several hack-a-Mac contests, which have not ever produced a winner. The one major issue that has affected legacy Macintosh operating systems was in fact related to misconfigured third-party software. On Macintosh systems offering Web or other Internet services, the appearance of a modal dialog box would divert resources from server programs, and was generally undesirable. A shareware program called Okie Dokie was developed that would simply select the default button in a modal dialog after a user-definable period. This helped servers to do their work rather than wait for user input.

Another popular third-party application is Timbuktu Pro. Timbuktu allows for remote screen control along with other features. A feature of the program is to allow guests to ask permission to use the machine. With Okie Dokie installed, when a guest asked for permission, a modal dialog box was presented, with a default of “allow.” Okie Dokie would automatically click the allow button, and the interloper would be allowed access to the system. This unfortunate misconfiguration was quickly identified and rectified by system administrators in short time. Due to the nature of the software involved this problem only affected a very small population of Macintosh users, those who were operating their Macintosh computers as Internet servers. Server configurations aside, there have never been any major attacks on Macintosh computers running the legacy Macintosh Operating System. Today however, things are much different. Today’s Macintosh Operating System is Unix based. The Unix operating system brings a lot of major benefits to the Macintosh community, enabling our computers to run the most up-to-date, robust software available from both commercial software companies, and those from the open source software movement. However the trade-off for this great flexibility is that we now have concerns and issues that were never of any consequence to us as Macintosh users before. Using Mac OS X, your personal computer shares a lot more in common with industrial strength servers in use in server rooms, such as database servers and Web and file servers, than it does with a Macintosh running Mac OS 9.

The additional power and flexibility of Unix comes at a price. That price is your consideration of security issues regarding your computer. At a minimum, this comes down to ensuring that your Operating System is kept up to date. Apple will frequently issue software updates that are designed to replace various bits of the system that contain bugs that can allow unauthorized users access to your system. Simply allowing the Software Update mechanism built into Mac OS X to run at regular intervals will keep your software current, and will ensure your machine’s basic security.

When considering security there are two angles that need to be covered, Physical and Local security and Network security. Physical security refers to the actual computer and hardware. Local security is like the inside view of your computer, from logging in to the computer, to what users can do on the computer once they are logged in. Network security refers to the outside view of your computer. How is it connected to the network or the Internet, and what can folks who are on other computers see of your computer. Although most serious security concerns focus on network security, that is hardening your computer to the outside, and allowing only authorized and necessary access to your computer from the network, there are several things that need to be taken care of locally and that is how we will start examining the situation.