New Patch Fixes 43 Flaws In OS X, Many Serious 2142

Yes. Any further questions?

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I think I am being consistent: Unix is a brand, and Apple can join in it if they wish. They haven't, and probably wont. If they did, it would have no security implications.

What's the problem?

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Because, where it comes to the "Unix" brand, people seem to think it's somehow different. That it identifies something more solid, like a particular codebase.

If this were so it might have security implications, but it is not so. "Unix" is like "Windows" or "Macintosh"; a brand that covers several *different* codebases of varying quality.

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Perhaps "would be" would please you more? Apple *did not* use the Tru64 kernel but the NeXTStep one. And, far more imporantly, the NeXTStep userspace as well.

It's a component of NeXTStep, and of Mac OS X, and of many other OSes.

Yet these OSes are often very different, because Mach is only a small part of them. So it is with any kernel, of course.

Of course. This is really quite elementary.

It does not control it *that* much; security breaches are still possible. Even privilege escalation.

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This doesn't help you much, because those smart college students were not scrutinizing Mac OS X or NeXTStep or Mach.

Even if the BSD bits that Apple added to the product are *complete* vulnerability free, it does not matter: this does nothing to mitigate the vulnerabilities inherited from NeXT, or the new ones added by Apple since.

It isn't.

It's got a tiny marketshare, so it is not profitable to exploit, and it has a savvier userbase than Windows. But, IMHO, that's all there is to it.

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I can only buttume that "the core" means "the microkernel"; both use Mach derivatives which are naturally similar in some respects, but this isn't important for security: what matters is the quality of the code, far more than the design of it.

In any case, a microkernel is a small part of an OS; the vast majority of what it does is not "in the core" in that sense.

are very very different.

This is quite untrue. If your book is telling you that applications on OS X work like applications on Unix, then it is trash.

The whole userspace is different. (If anything the differences favor Mac OS X, too.)

If this is so, then presumably "doing the same thing from a code point of view" did not save it.

You will observe how careful I am to bash Mac OS X rather than to pimp Windows. :D