Linked by Hadrien Grasland on Sat 25th Jun 2011 08:55 UTC, submitted by John
"Using a Mac may certainly be a safer choice for a lot of people as despite being vulnerable they are not targeted. However this is not the same as Macs being secure, something Eric Schmidt erroneously advised recently. I may be able to browse impervious to malware on a Mac at the moment, however I personally would not be comfortable using a platform so easily compromised if someone had the motivation to do so. In this article I address just why OS X is so insecure including the technical shortcomings of OS X as well as Apples policies as a company that contribute to the situation."
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Member since:
2011-01-28
Neolander,
"By only letting applications access their own folder and files explicitly pointed out by the user."
jack_perry,
"I don't see how this is a solution. A trojan that can convince a user to install it, can also convince a user to grant it access to all files in a Documents directory. Never mind the hassle to the user who's trying to run serious programs."
Imagine a new OS which doesn't have to inherit legacy software. A user can download, install, and run any application in a sandbox by default. The sandbox could access files opened explicitly through drag and drop or an open dialog box, as well as files created itself.
By far an large, legitimate applications (games/editors) will be able to run in the sandbox without any privilege escalation.
If an app turns out to be malicious, it's damage would be very limited in scope because of the sandbox.
If a game is downloaded from P2P network and requests higher privileges (let's say to access email), one could be fairly confident that it is malware.