Total domination of the World! … Or at least of your OS?

--Originally published at TC2027 – Will It Blog?

First of all I would like to say this was a post in collaboration with two other people: Cesar Cornejo and Audray (Ariadna)

About everybody knows by now that systems need security in order to protect data from access of unauthorized users or malicious programs. Operating Systems are no exception to this rule.

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Another characteristic of Operating Systems aside from performing hardware abstractions and sharing/coordinating data among processes, is that they also need to ensure security on each one of its resources such as CPU, disk memory, ram memory, programs and information or data that programs use.

UNIX/Linux

How do they achieve this? For example In UNIX systems at the most low level inside we have three protection domains available: owner, group and global. For each domain three operations are allowed over a certain resource and those are either reading (r), writing(w) and executing (x). So only the superuser (or the sudo user) can change resource settings in order to manage the permissions over those resources, the type of session that is allowed to use them and what are they allowed to do with them.

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Mac OS

On other hand, Apple’s Mac OS X implements extra layer security like:

  • Application Firewall which lets you control the connections made to your computer by others.
  • Gatekeeper which can block, in previous configuration, any install aside from the apps made by Apple.
  • XProtect which compares any downloaded file with a blacklist made by Apple of known malware.

This extra security measures can make a big difference to the average user of any computer and having them running by default is a big plus to not worry with technical issues.

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We can make an extra comment about an usual myth: Neither Mac’s nor Unix’s can’t get virus.It’s a lie, both of them can

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