I think Apple became much better at security in recent years. One example which I think is indicative of their approach to security - they bothered to add a hardware microphone disconnect when a macbook is closed. Source: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/secbbd20b00b/...
What's your thinking on this? From my perspective Apple security go pretty hard. They have a strong track record of being able to ship architectural mitigations like PACs / MIE / Exclaves first. I guess because Apple control the stack from silicon to userspace.
My thinking was in a historical context, and for their desktop OS's. I know they've been pretty on top of things with iPhones, and MacOS has become a lot better, but for the longest time MacOS was pretty lacking, coasting very much on promoting how much PCs have viruses and macs didn't, which was a marketshare thing more than a security thing. I don't think they got ASLR until later than pretty much everyone else, for example.
They've improved a lot, especially their phones, but I'd still never consider them a company that has a really strong focus on security.
They were not "coasting" on anything. Everything about OS X has always been designed to protect users from the stuff Apple hasn't caught yet, because they know they can't always catch it first - and Apple has led the pack in nearly every major OS security feature of the last 25 years.
That includes "don't give the user root, and ask the user for their password before doing dangerous things" - four years before Linux distros started moving to a similar model.
Didn’t Microsoft pioneer the privilege escalation prompts in Vista in 2007? It was a joke at the time how little things would hijack the entire screen to allow seemingly mundane things. I didn’t ever use Vista personally or professionally, but macOS has become pretty bad with basically the same model.
IMHO, both are a mode of progressively penalizing developers as a mode of API obsoletion. It doesn't feel like the opportunity to fix a degradation of user experience really motivated app developers in either case.
The difference is Apple is much more likely to progressively make these legacy feature compatibility more difficult for users to configure over time, and to remove them eventually.
Microsoft's Secure Desktop feature is actually incredibly well designed, and provides strong protect against fraudulent prompts or prompt interception attacks.
Yeah, they were. Virus writers were not targeting them as a platform because why develop for 10% marketshare when you can target 90% for free. It just wasn't worth it to target as a platform. So there was some level of protection due to lack of interest in distributed attacks, but the OS had very little protection against targeted attacks.
> Apple has led the pack in nearly every major OS security feature of the last 25 years.
What an absurd claim. Apple trails behind, it never leads in this space. Windows 7 had numerous protections that had become standards that Apple still lacked when Windows 10 came out.
Recently there was an Anki vulnerability that gave any website access to any local files. On Windows or Linux this would be deadly. On macOS, Anki can't access my desktop or documents or Chrome storage or password manager storage. I think Apple's been smart about which security features it prioritizes.
> That includes "don't give the user root, and ask the user for their password before doing dangerous things" - four years before Linux distros started moving to a similar model.
Linux distros have always required sudo for "dangerous" things. What distros made users root by default?
That's a really strange claim given AS was a refinement of a technology other manufacturers have yet to surpass in the ten years since the T1 chip came out.
To this day nobody else ties their SMC, biometric auth, and HSM together as tightly and well as the T1 did. AS was further advancement of that.
Furthermore, Apple protects users against the legal changes that have allowed law enforcement to physically force someone to provide biometric credentials. By default MS just provides biometric auth to make it easier to log in to your system.
iOS always had a strong focus on security but if you take the time period say 2005 - 2015 it did not seem like there was much investment in macOS security at Apple. I am talking about stuff like exploit mitigations and relatively low hanging LPEs. Features like (full) ASLR / SIP / kext controls were added well after competitors.
> I guess because Apple control the stack from silicon to userspace.
People always say this but there is no real relationship there. When hardware vendors add security technologies to the hardware, the major third party operating systems add support to use it pretty much immediately, and in many cases before the hardware even ships because the hardware vendor publishes the documentation ahead of time.
Try to name something where Apple was the first to support something (by a non-trivial amount of time) not because they were the first to add hardware support but because they released the combination of hardware and software in the time between when e.g. Intel or Qualcomm added hardware support and when Linux or Windows added software support to use it.