Apple patches patchy

FRUIT-THEMED toymaker, Apple has been accused of over-marketing its ability to patch its software.

The advertisements might give you the impression that OS-X is jolly well written and secure, but it seems that the Cappuccino outfit is not quite as secure as the Umpire of Evil Microsoft.

At a recent Black Hat security conference, delegates were shocked to be told by boffins from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology that Apple’s performance on patches was, er... patchy.

The boffins looked at how many times over the past six years the two vendors were able to have a patch available on the day a vulnerability became publicly known, which they call the zero-day patch rate. They then took this number and divided by their shoe size and discovered that there were 658 vulnerabilities affecting Microsoft products and 738 affecting Apple.

This might be OK if Apple ever bothered to patch them particularly fast. The boffins said that Apple was below 20 unpatched vulnerabilities at disclosure consistently before 2005 but these days Apple is always above that figure.

The net result is that the number of unpatched vulnerabilities are higher at Apple.

One of the reasons is that while Vole has been chummy with the security community, Apple keeps them at arms’ length. µ

L'Inq

Security IT World