Thursday, January 20, 2005

Security firm Immunity has reported several vulnerabilities in Darwin, the Unix implementation which Apple calls the "rock-solid foundation" of Mac OS X. The vulnerabilities affect all recent versions of OS X, Immunity said in an advisory published on Wednesday.

While they won't be serious for most users, the bugs are the latest blow to OS X's reputation as being free from the security problems that plague Windows. Some security researchers have argued that reputation is unwarranted, saying Windows bugs simply get more publicity and cause more mayhem because the operating system is so widespread.

Immunity founder and chief executive Dave Aitel said the problems wouldn't be very serious for most users, because OS X isn't widely used as a server operating system. He said security experts have never considered the operating system particularly invulnerable. "Apple's never been that secure from a local perspective," he told Techworld.

In an analysis last year, security firm Secunia found that OS X doesn't stand out as particularly more secure than the competition. The operating system had a similar proportion of critical bugs to competitors such as Windows XP Professional, Red Hat Advanced Server and Suse Linux Enterprise Server, Secunia said.