Tag Archives: Mac Security

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Holy White Papers, Apple?!?!?

May 21, 2012 – 5:00 am

For those of you who say Apple doesn’t care about the enterprise, Apple has released a number of assets (technical white papers) on integrating Macs (Lion) into enterprise environments at http://training.apple.com/lion. This is also the page that you’ll find links to all of the official training and certification courses for Lion. The assets up on this page are about as close to a publicly accessible book on integrating OS X into the enterprise as you’ll to see for Lion…

The first covers the basics of integrating Macs into enterprise environments:

The second covers self support:

The third is on evaluating Macs in Enterprise environments:

The fourth is on deployment:

The fifth is on integrating with Active Directory:

The sixth is on managing Macs with Configuration Profiles:

The seventh is on OS X Security:

The last of the papers is on 802.1x authentication:

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Mac OS X Mac Security

Disable Quarantine

February 8, 2010 – 9:00 am

I recently wrote up an article on some of the new malware safeguards in Snow Leopard. Well, turns out some people want to disable some of it. So you know the prompt that you are downloading an application that then asks you if you want to open it since it’s been quarantined. Well, you can disable it (not that you should but I’ve seen a couple of cases now where I needed to. To do so you’re going to place an LSQuarantine key into the com.apple.LaunchServices.plist. To do so, run:

defaults write com.apple.LaunchServices LSQuarantine -bool NO

To set it back to normal:

defaults write com.apple.LaunchServices LSQuarantine -bool YES

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Mac OS X Mac OS X Server Mac Security

Quick and Dirty md5

March 27, 2009 – 8:50 pm

A hashing function is used to calculate a hash value.  If you insert a file into a hashing function then it should produce a value that is almost certain to be unique (there’s always the remote likelihood that no matter how good your function, you may end up with a duplicate).  

The openssl command is used to access a number of functions/ciphers including sha1, base64, md5, rc4/rc5 and of course des/des3.  It is a very simple command to use, simply provide the cipher, followed by the path to the file you would like to get a hash value (aka digest) for.  So if I have a file called myfile.txt and I would like to get a digest for it I could just use the following command:

openssl md5 myfile.txt

At its most basic level, we’re just leveraging openssl to grab digests quickly and easily.

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Mac OS X Mac OS X Server Mac Security

Mac OS X: Spoofing MAC Addresses in 5 Seconds

March 10, 2009 – 5:09 am

Every hardware network adapter has a unique MAC address.  However, they’re not always what they seem.  According to Wikipedia:

MAC Spoofing is a hacking technique of changing an assigned Media Access Control (MAC) address of a networked device to a different one. The changing of the assigned MAC address may allow the bypassing of access control lists on servers or routers, either hiding a computer on a network or allowing it to impersonate another computer.

I was talking to someone the other day about security and the topic of spoofing MAC addresses came up.  They seemed to discount that this was usually a concern except for in super secure environments because they considered it an extremely complex process.  Here’s my answer to that:

ifconfig en0 ether 00:00:00:00:00:00 

That should take you about 5 seconds to copy to your clipboard and paste into a terminal window…  You can then replace the en0 with whichever adapter you’d like to implement the spoofed addy on, and hopefully the series of zero’s here with the actual MAC address of a target host.  The next comment was that it was really hard to figure out a MAC address and that’s what makes it hard to spoof them.  If it’s local and you can ping it then arp will cache it.  Therefore, see the IP of the host you’d like to spoof the MAC on in your arp cache with a little:

arp -a

Which gives you something like:

? (192.168.210.249) at 0:16:cb:aa:dc:58 on en1 [ethernet]

Now, once you’ve set the MAC, you’ll need to reboot to undo it.  Or just set it back if you copied it before running the earlier command.

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Mac Security

Cyber Crimes Article at PCMag

October 1, 2008 – 4:22 pm

Article on the 10 Most Mysterious Cyber Crimes:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2331225,00.asp

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Active Directory Mac OS X Mac OS X Server Mac Security Mass Deployment Windows Server

Mac OS X: Force LDAP Signing using dsconfigad

September 27, 2008 – 11:33 pm

dsconfigad did not support signing of LDAP packets in 10.4.x.  However, this was an upgrade that was introduced in the 10.5 version of the AD Plug-in.  Provided that your Active Directory environment uses LDAP signing, a standard policy with DCs, you can mirror your settings on the DC in dsconfigad by using the -packetsigning option followed by either an allow, disable or require variable.  To force LDAP signing, just run the following command:

dsconfigad -packetsigning required

To then disable signing if your environment doesn’t support it use the following command:

dsconfigad -packetsigning disable

The default variable is allow, which will use LDAP signing when possible.

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Mac OS X Mac OS X Server

Better Late than Never

August 16, 2008 – 2:12 am

New Apple security update.  Not that it fixes everything it intends but it’s a good start…  

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2647

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Active Directory Mac OS X Mac OS X Server Mac Security

Mac OS X Server 10.5: Customizing Trust Time for the adplugin

August 14, 2008 – 1:57 pm

You can use the adplugin to customize the amount of time a client is trusted by Active Directory.  It can be done by using the following command:

dsconfigad -passinterval 30

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Mac OS X Mac Security

Mac OS X Server 10.5: Using NATd to turn the Server into a Router

August 12, 2008 – 12:54 pm

There are certain aspects of Mac OS X Server that it just isn’t that great at.  One of them is acting as a router.  It’s just a fact that an appliance by SonicWALL, Cisco, Watchguard and sometimes LinkSys will run circles around the speed and feature set of Mac OS X Server.  So with that in mind, let’s look at how you would go about configuring a basic port forward on OS X Server if you decided not to listen to me on this point…  ;)

You can use the /etc/net/natd.plist.  The key you’ll want to edit is the redirect_port, one per port or a range of all in one key…  Basically the array would look something like this assuming you were trying to forward afp traffic to 192.168.0.2 from a WAN IP of 4.2.2.2:

<key>redirect_port</key>

<array>

    <dict>

    <key>proto</key>

        <string>TCP</string>

    <key>targetIP</key>

        <string>192.168.0.2</string>

    <key>TargetPortRange</key>

        <string>548</string>

    <key>aliasIP</key>

        <string>4.2.2.2</string>

    <key>aliasPortRange</key>

        <string>548</string>

    </dict>

</array>

 

You could also use the route command or ipfw depending on exactly what you’re trying to do with this thing.  Route is going to be useful if you’re trying to respond to network traffic over a different interface than the default interface.

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Articles and Books Mac OS X Mac Security

DNS Caching and Apple

July 31, 2008 – 1:15 pm

In the article at http://www.macworld.com/article/134793/2008/07/apple_dns.html John Welch goes off on Apple for their delay in the whole DNS Poisoning exploit.  It’s kindof amusing…

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