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Comment by JCattheATM | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

MacOS X prompted users for their passwords in 2001.

Microsoft's implementation was (twenty years later still is) a joke because it prompted users to hit enter or click a button.

Microsoft's Secure Desktop feature is actually incredibly well designed, and provides strong protect against fraudulent prompts or prompt interception attacks.

Only if you configure it like that, you can make it ask for a password, and on more recent versions of Windows 11, optionally, a single use token.

Ironically Apple just recently added the same simpified approach.

> Only if you configure it like that

It is the default (unless they changed it in the last 2 years or so). I know for a fact that my PC and Laptop don't ask for my password and I know for a fact that I reinstalled Windows on my laptop less than 2 years ago and changed nothing regarding the UAC prompt (the closest that is even remotely close is enabling sudo in the settings).

May be, I never leave defaults on neither does our IT, so I might have that wrong.

It was a joke mainly because of badly designed Windows apps being used to running as root in XP and earlier would ask for permissions _all_the_time_.

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.

> They were not "coasting" on anything.

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.

> What an absurd claim. Apple trails behind

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?

Windows and macOS both got ASLR in 2007.

For another example: macOS integrated antivirus in 2009, while Windows did so in 2012.

Apple's ASLR was incomplete and basically trash for a long time, it didn't get proper ASLR until much later.

Agree that pre Apple Silicon, macOS didn't get much focus. Fair point historically.

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 am PC, I am Mac campaign is from 2006, quite long time ago.

Sure, I think I gave it that context by using the term historical.

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