Aussie researcher claims OS X Lion's passwords crackable
An Australian security expert respected for his work testing the defences of Apple software has published a method which appears to allow an attacker to break through the password defences of Cupertino’s latest Max OS X Lion operating system.
In a new blog post this week — first reported by Secure Computing Magazine last week — Dunstan published an update to his technique. However, this time around he discovered a startling new fact with respect to Lion’s security protection — according to the researcher it leaves a crucial step out which could allow remote access to user passwords on the system.
In previous versions of Mac OS X, in order to access a users’ password, an attacker would need to break into what is referred to in Unix-based operating systems (such as Mac OS X) as a ‘shadow’ file — a file which stores critical data but can only be accessed by users with a high privilege — such as root access.
