Security of Mac Keychain, Filevault
Jerry Leichter
leichter at lrw.com
Thu Oct 29 23:25:17 EDT 2009
A couple of days ago, I pointed to an article claiming that these were
easy to break, and asked if anyone knew of security analyses of these
facilities.
I must say, I'm very disappointed with the responses. Almost everyone
attacked the person quoted in the article. The attacks they assumed
he had in mind were unproven or unimportant or insignificant. Gee ...
sounds *exactly* like the response you get from companies when someone
finds a vulnerability in their products: It's not proven; who is this
person anyway; even if there is an attack, it isn't of any practical
importance.
Meanwhile, I know many of us on this list use Macs, and many of us
rely on keychain and Filevault, or at least on encrypted disk images.
On what rational basis do we rely these? The only analysis of
Filevault that I know of is Applebaum and Weinmann's http://crypto.nsa.org/vilefault/23C3-VileFault.pdf
, which dates back to 2006, two releases of Mac OS ago. (It found the
basic mechanisms sound, with some problems around the edges.) I'm not
aware of any analyses of Keychain, although key chains can be
extremely high-value. If no one on this list is aware of any
analyses, I'd guess they just don't exist.
Over all, Apple's designs and implementations of security code have
been good, but hardly perfect. (Witness the recent questionable
implementation of encryption on the iPhone 3GS.) So these are
legitimate issues. Meanwhile, I'm sure many of us have potentially
high-value passwords - like our Mobile Me password - stored in our
iPhones and iPod Touches. How safe is that? I have yet to see any
analysis of that question either (though I suspect the answer is "not
very").
-- Jerry
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