Columnist: Safari Security Fails to Learn from Past

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Three mistakes in the security design of Safari show that Apple has failed to learn from past mistakes, according to a guest editorial at ZDNet by a security team leader, Aviv Raff.

The mistakes Apple has made were compared to the ways other browsers and OSes handle the issues:

  1. Automatic file downloading, aka, carpet bombing.
  2. Browser fuzzing.
  3. Predictable locations for cache and cookies.

"In conclusion, before porting the Safari browser from Mac to Windows, Apple should have looked at past browser vulnerabilities and design flaws, and really try to avoid them," Mr. Raff, a security team leader for a Fortune 500 company, said. "The examples above show that Apple didn?t learn anything from past mistakes."

What Mr, Raff failed to point out is that no known, in the wild, exploits have been traced to these issues. Even so, a healthy discussion about ways to improve security is always good, especially when it helps keep one step ahead of the bad guys.

John Martellaro

John Martellaro

John Martellaro was born at an early age and began writing about computers soon after that. He is a former U.S. Air Force officer and has worked for NASA, White Sands Missile Range, Lockheed Martin Astronautics, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Apple. At Apple he worked as a Senior Marketing Manager, a Federal Account Executive and a High Performance Computing manager. His interests include skiing, chess, science fiction and astronomy. You can follow John on Twitter at twitter.com/jmartellaro.

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