Two of Apple’s list of 300+ Leopard features “leapt off the page,” headed right straight at Blackfriars’ Marketing’s Carl Howe:
Tagging Downloaded Applications
Protect yourself from potential threats. Any application downloaded to your Mac is tagged. Before it runs for the first time, the system asks for your consent — telling you when it was downloaded, what application was used to download it, and, if applicable, what URL it came from.
Signed Applications
Feel safe with your applications. A digital signature on an application verifies its identity and ensures its integrity. All applications shipped with Leopard are signed by Apple, and third-party software developers can also sign their applications.
Howe writes, “Those features jumped out at me because the very first Forrester report I wrote in 1996 was about desktop security and the threat of active content. In that report, I wrote that if you want a truly secure platform, you need both app signing and run-time validation to guarantee that you only run trusted code. I further noted that Windows would never become a truly secure platform without these features. The fact that these features they are built into Leopard says that even as Macs gain in popularity, Apple has no intent of letting its OS or its iPhone become an easy security target. And these two features are worth the entire cost of upgrade and more to anyone worried about desktop and server security.“
“Users will have to designate each [application] as trusted the first time they run them,” Howe explains, “[but] it’s a small one-time price for a more secure system. And it’s better to start now than waiting until there are 100 or 200 million Leopard computers in the field.”
“It’s nice to see Apple not only talk about platform security, but to actually do something about it. And the fact that the millions of iPhones in the world will be both 1) open and 2) secure because they use the same secure foundation says volumes about their bright future,” Howe writes. “Nice work, Apple.”
Full article here.