So those who would like to recover anything from that drive will have a lot of “fun”. Then it proceeds with a thorough wipe of all data from the disk. First, it kills the encryption keys from the Mac, which is supposed to make the data “completely inaccessible”, according to Apple. It can also encrypt any removable drive, helping the user secure Time Machine backups or other external drives.įileVault 2 also allows users to wipe all the data on the drive, and it’s done in two stages. Apple says that initial encryption is fast and unobtrusive. Yet another security tool, it encrypts the entire drive on Mac, protecting the data with XTS-AES 128 encryption. Other options include “Anywhere” (the least safe) and “Mac App Store” (nothing else it’s the high security setting). Otherwise it’s blocked, but manual override is possible. If it does not, it won’t launch, unless setting are changed.īy default (unlike OS X Lion v10.7.5, for instance) Gatekeeper allows users to download apps from the Mac App Store and those signed with a Developer ID. In a nutshell, Gatekeeper checks whether the app downloaded from other places rather than Mac App Store has the proper Developer ID. It’s similar in its purpose and behavior to the Windows User Account Control (UAC).
It’s an old (presented in Mac OS X Mountain Lion 10.8) feature protecting Mac from malware and “misbehaving apps downloaded from the internet”. #Security features in #Mac OS X Yosemite Tweet It’s a marketing approach but it also helps to explain which does what. Most of the security tools involved have a specific name – Gatekeeper, FileVault. Apple does it right, or at least it says it does. Actually, it always has been but not every developer has been thinking about building in security from the ground up. This is something extremely welcomed these days. However, it doesn’t say a lot about what features are new.įirst of all, Apple states, security was “the first thought.
Apple has actually set up a special page dedicated to security for Mac OS X with lengthy text – there’s a lot of it, but it’s comprehensible and rather easy to read.
Mac OS X Yosemite (10.10) has arrived, and it’s time to look at what it’s going to offer us from the security point of view.