[OT] OS security design (was: elder parent-proofing a computer)

  This is really rather off-topic, but as a professional sysadmin, I
feel security is a critical topic worth addressing.

On Sat, Jun 23, 2012 at 6:20 PM, JC Dill <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Just wait until the Mac gets seriously targeted....
>
> Oh please, not this FUD.  Not on inet-access.  Please!  Can't I count
> on THIS group to have more sense than this?
>
> The Mac OS is inherently more secure ...

  The security design of the OS has little to nothing to do with
almost all of the security attacks being perpetrated today.  In
particular, it doesn't matter what the OS does if the user tells it to
allow the attack.  Further, keeping the OS secured is only a means to
an end.  If the attacks can operate entirely under the privileges of
the user, it doesn't really matter what the OS is.

  Now that the Mac has really started to succeed again, attackers are
starting to attack that platform again.  Mac malware in the wild was
basically zero even as recently as a year ago.  Now there are at least
a few active threats.  That's the price of success -- Apple is now a
target worth looking at.

  Unfortunately, you and your dad are discovering this the hard way.

  Attacks on MS-Windows is still much more prevalent, of course, but
MS-Windows still has a much bigger portion of the market, too.  If
Apple continues to succeed, they will continue to attract attacks.

> (a UNIX multi-user system where a regular user ...

  In terms of the OS core, NT, MacOS, and Unix adhere to fairly
similar security models: Simple subjects (user accounts assign to
people or roles), with discretionary access control on files and other
objects.

  Microsoft has chosen a number of really poor defaults for many
years, and still does on some things.  Granting users system
privileges by default, and allowing fairly relaxed permissions, being
the two big ones.  However, a knowledgeable user such as yourself can
change these fairly easily.  Under more recent releases (NT 6.x and
later), all you really have to do is not put the user account in the
"Administrators" group.

> ... even with "administration privileges" has to authenticate as
> super-user to do certain things)

  The root account on Unix has full access to everything without
further authentication.  I suspect you are thinking of sudo and
similar tools, where users who *don't* have system privileges can run
processes under another account (typically root) which does have
system privileges.  The same model is available on MS-Windows, should
you choose to employ it.

> When bugs are found, the default state of the OS is that
> access is prohibited unless a specific permissions were
> changed to allow access.

  I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.  Neither NT nor Unix
has a single default stance that applies to the entire OS.  The
filesystem and other parts of the system have a variety of
permissions, which vary from system to system and version to version.
It's all about what the designer chooses.

  Certainly, many of Microsoft's "stock" permissions are very lax,
although they've started to clean things up somewhat in more recent
releases (NT 6.x and later).  But even under NT 5.0 ("Windows 2000"),
it was possible to apply the "high security template" with one
command, which applied restrictive permissions to all objects.

  Unless you're referring to "classic Windows", i.e., the DOS-based
graphical shell and extended environment that included Win 3.x, Win
95/98, and finally died with Windows ME.  Those products has no
security worth speaking of, and were basically always toys.  But
they're long dead at this point.  Comparing Mac OS X with them would
be akin to comparing NT 6.1 ("Windows 7") with classic Mac System.

> This is the opposite from how Windows does security - where by
> default access is allowed, unless a specific rule has been added
> to prohibit access ...

  Under NT, if an object really does have an empty ACL, access is denied.

-- Ben
-- 
Eat sushi frequently. - Avi
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