Leopard’s Firewall Faulted by Security Researchers

· by · News

Researchers at Heise Security have noted that, even after an upgrade from Tiger to Leopard, if the firewall was turned on in Tiger, it is turned off in Leopard, according to Robert Vamosiis C|Net Blog on Tuesday.

In addition, even if the Leopard firewall is once again turned on, some incoming connections will be allowed, determined by Leopard by default.

J?rgen Schmidt, editor in chief at Heise Security said, for example, his team was able to query the NetBIOS Naming Service on the network even with the firewall on. His team also had a problem filtering UDP packets in Leopard [in the firewall].

Heise Security also faulted Apple for not including the latest version of Samba which has bug fixes. Itis the same version as in Tiger.

TMO notes that Apple typically avoids confusion by keeping things simple for novices but offers a UNIX architecture that allows professionals to implement whatever they need. Also, in Leopard, the firewall has been moved from the Sharing System Preference to Security.

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.

Sign Up for the Newsletter

Enter a valid email address

Join the TMO Express Daily Newsletter to get the latest Mac headlines in your e-mail every weekday.

Adding to list…

No Comments

Add your comment

Commenting is not available in this channel entry.