How in the TECH » OS X

Mac OS X hacked in less than 30 minutes

Adam Myers — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 23:03:03 +0000

“Gaining root access to a Mac is ‘easy pickings,’ according to an individual who in less than 30 minutes won an OS X hacking challenge last month by gaining root control of a machine using an unpublished security vulnerability.”

I’m sure this is going to spread like wildfire across the Internets today, but let me take a minute to debunk this. As best I see, the website in question allows users to create their own UNIX-style accounts through a LDAP interface. From this remote access shell, the said hacker was able to use a vulnerability to escalate his privileges to root-level. Sure, its a succesful hack, but I’m not aware of any “secure” machines configured to allow users to create their own shell access. Furthermore, I do not believe SSH is even enabled by default on OS X (though to be fair, most admins will turn this on).

What’s the significance? It’s not that OS X isn’t hackable, or that this sysadmin gave far more remote access than is normal; no, it’s that no one operating system is more or less secure than another. Security is an ongoing project, completed one day, only to begin the next.

OSx86 10.4.4 Security Broken

Adam Myers — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 16:40:01 +0000

Apple’s hardware based platform-protection for Mac OS X has been broken. What has it been, a month or less since the hardware was released? Artificially restricting people from something they want (enough to actually buy it, even!) combined with an interesting challenge for hackers by using new protection methods is a good way to get your software cracked quickly.

What a waste of engineering. This is why all the effort behind HD movie disc protection is stupid. Not only are you going to have hackers salivating over the idea of dismantling the system just because its something new and interesting (and the fame that comes with it), but you’re also creating a huge inconvenience for people that actually want to buy your product!

Spending a little money to make some trivial protection to stop the most casual copying is the only thing worthwhile. These companies should put a fair price on their product and sell to the people that want it. Putting a premium price on BD-ROMs and slapping ridiculous protection on them is pointless. They should cost the same as DVDs and have only trivial protection. DVD protection is easy enough for grandma to bypass yet they still fly off the shelves.

I hope Sony/Toshiba/Movie studios wake up when the public decides they don’t want to pay for this crap.

Taming Apple’s Tiger for Your PC

Adam Myers — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 17:02:47 +0000

There are not enough “How I Installed OS X on my Dell.” Here’s my contribution, in twelve easy steps.

1) Get tiger-x86.tar.bz2

2) Unpack tiger-x86-flat.img to a separate NTFS hard drive

3) Load up the system with the Knoppix Live CD

4) If the drive from step 2 is external, attach it and let Knoppix automount it

5) Open up a terminal

Use su to become root
Switch to the directory Knoppix mounted from step 4 (look in /mnt/)
Execute ls –all to verify that the .img file exists
Execute dd bs=1048576 if=./tiger-x86-flat.img of=/dev/hda, where hda is the *drive* you wish to install to. hda=drive 1, hdb=drive 2, etc

6) When it has finished copying, reboot and select the drive you want as the startup from the BIOS or boot menu

7) With some luck, you should be staring at an Apple logon screen

If the system hangs, Boot into safe mode by using the –x parameter at the Darwin boot screen

9) Create your own account, Apple Menu->System Pref-> Users.

10) Relogin as yourself. It is safe to remove “deadmoo”

11) Finally, delete the file /System/Library/Extentions/AppleTPMACPI.ktext

Hold down the Windows key and empty trash if the system complains the file is in use
Reboot

12) Profit!