[opus_az]

Hi...

I was chatting with a Mac consultant who said something pretty interesting. He said the main reason OS X is so much more immune to viruses and malware is that the core and kernel are open source. So, he says, there's an entire community poking around and finding vunerabilities so Apple can patch them before any exploits are released.

So, my question is, besides the inherent strengths of a unix-based kernel, how much does open source affect OS X's security?

(I'm a newb to OS X so maybe I'm not clear on Darwin/BSD and Core/Kernel. If so, feel free to correct me.)

[analogika]

That *is* one of the inherent strengths of a unix-based system.

Fact is, OS X's entire networking architecture is BSD, meaning that there are a HUGE number of paid security professionals in charge of securing corporate and scientific servers that run BSD variants, who do nothing but scour the source code all day, searching for security holes and patching them, and then making the patch code public.

So in general, open-source means that the people discovering the security problems are then immediately able to fix them themselves, or at least pass them on to the community immediately.

This is a stark contrast to *ahem* other systems, where security is at the complete mercy of the manufacturer.

[Big Mac]

OS X's open source foundations are one reason why it's so secure, but I'd counter that the bigger reason why is because OS X has a proper security model that makes it a lot more difficult for software to gain root privileges and wreck an entire system. There's much less opportunity and therefore little incentive to write malware.