Lion Security: Building on the iOS Foundation [telecom]

Lion Security: Building on the iOS Foundation

by Rich Mogull TidBITS

It has long been a truism among tech pundits that Apple users suffer few security attacks due to relatively low market penetration making Macs uninteresting to professional cybercriminals. That may have been true five to ten years ago, but thanks to the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, we can now say with assurance that obscurity is no longer Apple's primary defense against attacks.

With over 220 million iOS devices sold, Apple dominates the tablet market and is one of the major players in the smartphone market, placing the company on the front lines of the security wars. Since the initial release of the iPhone, Apple has continually added to iOS important security defenses lacking in Mac OS X to keep up with both attacks and jailbreaks. (Every jailbreak is technically a security attack used to circumvent Apple's iOS restrictions.)

How does this relate to Lion? Before Apple formalized the name as "iPhone OS" and then "iOS," the operating system on Apple's handheld devices was simply "OS X" or sometimes "OS X for iPhone." Apple representatives made the distinct point that it was merely a variant of Mac OS X, and this was reinforced once people started jailbreaking (and later developing for) the platform. While not identical, iOS and Mac OS X are more alike than different.

Apple has been extremely clear that a key goal in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion was to incorporate lessons learned on iOS back into Mac OS X. While many of these changes were focused on the user experience - gestures, Launchpad, and so on - Apple also migrated significant under-the-hood security improvements from iOS into Lion.

With Lion, Apple has focused on three significant security improvements that have been put to the test in iOS and closed one longstanding gap in how memory is protected, along with some smaller changes.

To be clear, all of these features existed in Mac OS X before Lion in one form or another; the way Apple has combined and enhanced them to change the entire Mac application and OS ecosystem clearly shows the influence of iOS.

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