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10 steps to better secure your Mac laptop from physical data theft

Introduction

Sophos’s recent threat report1 showed that while the Macintosh platform is now

becoming the target of the same sort of organized crime that affects Windows users,

these attacks are still very limited in scope and in impact. Nonetheless, we Mac users

cannot afford to be complacent. The success of many data theft attacks depends more on

the target system’s user and the way in which they work with their computer, than on

which operating system they have chosen to install.

Laptops are more prone to physical attack than desktop systems by their nature – being

portable they are often taken out of the office to work from home, on the train or even in

the local Starbucks. When you take your machine out on the road, you also take the data

it contains away from the safety of the corporate environment with its security controls

and into new environments with new risks and threats. Home users too must realize that

when taking their MacBook out of the front door, more of their identity is on display than

simply their preferred laptop brand.

In this paper I describe 10 steps that can improve the security of a Mac system, paying

particular attention to laptop considerations. I concentrate on improving physical security

– that is, protecting the system from attackers who can get their hands onto the

computer.

1 Does it need to come with you?

The first step in securing your remote computing lifestyle and increasing data protection is considering whether you need

to take everything out. All of the attacks discussed here involve getting data from the

computer – the easiest way to stop that from happening is to ensure that the data isn’t

there in the first place. In some environments, the attacker doesn’t even need a computer;

I have been sat in numerous cafés and on trains where I could see the online banking

pages of other customers, and could (were I so inclined) read their account numbers,

balances and the payments they were making. Simply put, I could see all of the

information that an identity thief works to collate. While governmental departments such

as the UK’s HMRC may lose information about millions of people, most of the data on

your laptop concerns one important person: you. Deciding whether all of this information

really needs to come with you is the first, and most important, step to take on the road to

safer computing.

In some cases this might not be so easy. John Gruber, author of Mac blog Daring

Fireball2, says: “My primary computer is a PowerBook that I use both at home and on the

road. The only difference in how I use it on the road is that at home, I’m always

connected to the internet, but on the road, network access depends on the availability of

Wi-Fi. Otherwise, no difference.” In such a situation, leaving everything at home

(perhaps on an external drive) loses the convenience of carrying on your work when you’re

out. But I would say this is a compromise well worth making.

2 Change your Keychain password and settings

I asked John Gruber what changes he had made to his Mac OS X configuration with

respect to security. His answer: “The only significant change I’ve made is that I use a

different password for my Keychain than for my user account.” That’s a change I also

make on all of my systems. The Keychain allows you to keep internet passwords, notes

and SSL certificates in an encrypted store, and synchronize them between different

machines with .Mac. So far, so good – of course there is only a single password to unlock

all of this information, but it means that you can choose one really good password that

you can remember, then use different passwords for all of the websites, mail accounts

and so on that you use, which you don’t need to keep in your head (or on a Post-It note)

because you can always get them out of the Keychain. The problem with the default

Keychain configuration is that this password is synchronized with your login password;

whenever you are logged in, the items in your Keychain are unlocked and available to any

application that asks for them.

It is simple to fix this: firstly, open the Keychain Access application in

/Applications/Utilities. In the Edit menu, choose “Change password for Keychain ‘login’...”

and set a new password. Now when an application needs a password out of the

Keychain, it has to prompt you for that password; a slight reduction in convenience but

with a huge payoff in being able to control when your stored passwords are used. You

can also control when the Keychain is automatically locked (so that you get re-prompted

for the password) through the Keychain’s settings, accessed from the “Change Settings for

Keychain ‘login’...” menu item.

3 Lock the screen when away from the computer

Imagine the scene: you are logged into a website (perhaps checking your credit card

balance, or seeing how many people have poked you today) in the coffee shop, when the

barista tells you your drink is ready. You won’t be far away and you can still see the

laptop, so it is not going to get stolen... but while you’re up, the nice girl on the next table

makes a few notes on a napkin, and by the time you get home your credit card is a few

hundred pounds lighter.

This situation can be easily avoided by using the password-protected screen saver built

into Mac OS X. In the Security system preferences pane, make sure that “Require

password to wake this computer from sleep or screensaver” is enabled. Now it is also

useful to have a quick way to activate the screensaver, and two options are available.

The first is to set up a hot corner in the screensaver preferences, so that when you move

the mouse pointer into that corner of the screen, the screensaver will activate. The second

can be found in the preferences of the Keychain Access program: choose “Show status in

menu bar.” The padlock icon which appears shows whether the Keychain is currently

locked; clicking on it provides a menu from which one option is to lock the screen.

4 Filevault

It is hard to imagine that you would ever forget your laptop and leave it at the train

station, but it does happen. You have probably got insurance to cover the cost of the

computer, and while it will be a hassle to recover all those files from a backup (less so

with Time Machine, of course) you can soon get back to working again. Anyway, that

MacBook Air looks so lonely on the shelf all by itself... but what has happened to the data

on the iBook you left behind? If it was picked up by a cracker, then they probably didn’t

even turn the computer on, but just removed the hard drive and dropped it into a different

computer. Then, without even needing to crack your password, all of the files – browser

history, downloaded mail, Pages documents and so on – on that drive are ripe for the

picking.

Filevault solves that problem in a simple way: it replaces your home directory, the area on

the hard drive where all your personal files are stored, with an encrypted container. This

container can only be unlocked by supplying one of two passwords – either your login

password or the “master password”, a catch-all password in case the login password is

forgotten. The encryption used by Filevault is of a standard deemed safe to use by US

government agencies.3

To enable Filevault, go to the Security pane in System Preferences, and choose the

Filevault tab. Click on the “Turn On Filevault...” option, and you will be asked both to

enter a master password and your own account’s password. The Mac will convert your

home directory into an encrypted container, and you cannot log in until this is complete.

It is important that this step isn’t interrupted, so if you are using a laptop plug it into the

mains before enabling Filevault.

The master password can be used to remove the Filevault encryption from your home folder, so it’s best to use a very complex password here, although if you are going to write it down then of course you have to keep it somewhere it won’t be found.

Using Filevault or any other encryption (see below for two more options built-in to Mac

OS X) raises a question about backups: do you keep your backups encrypted, or back up

the files inside the encrypted container in the clear? There is no right answer, but I choose

to keep unencrypted backups because my backup disk stays at home where I can be

confident about who accesses it. Time Machine, the built-in backup system on Mac OS X,

will only back up the Filevault volume when you log out, not on the regular schedule.

5 Encrypted disk images

Covering your whole home directory with encryption may seem like overkill, especially if

you only have a few sensitive files. You can use the same encryption mechanism that

Filevault employs to create your own encrypted disk images, which can be used from the

Finder in exactly the same way as regular images except that you cannot see the contents

without entering your password.

Launch the Disk Utility application from /Applications/Utilities, and click on “New Image”.

From the drop-down which appears, choose the 128-bit option from Encryption, and

configure the image as you like. (By the way, this is a great way to make an encrypted

USB key drive – format the drive, then create an encrypted disk image on it using some –

or all – of the free space.)

6 Keychain secure notes

For short notes which should be hidden from the view of others, you can create Secure

Notes in the Keychain Access application which can then only be viewed by entering your

Keychain password. This could be useful if you want to write yourself a reminder without

letting anyone else see it, for example to remind you about a task in your online banking

website.

7 Secure Empty Trash

When you delete a file from the hard drive in your Mac, it is not really deleted – the info

telling the computer where to find the file is removed, but the data will remain on the disk

until the space is needed to store something else. It is really easy to recover deleted files,

you can buy off-the-shelf programs such as FileSalvage5which can do it. Therefore even

your deleted files are not safe from the interested cracker.

By selecting “Secure Empty Trash” from the Finder menu to empty the Trash, you can make recovery of the deleted files much harder. It’s still not impossible, although it will require complex (and expensive) forensics equipment to do. Secure Empty Trash writes over

the files a number of times before deleting them, which makes it difficult to discover the original

contents. Securely deleting files can be a slow process.

8 Encrypted swap files

Many news websites have reported the story that security researchers have found a way

to recover passwords6 from the RAM of computers running a variety of operating systems

including Mac OS X. The constraints on that particular attack are very limited (the

attacker needs physical access, and must be able to reboot the system, then boot from

their own removable media within less than a minute), but the applicability is wider on

Mac OS X for a simple reason: it is possible for your login password to get into the swap

file, a file on the hard drive used to simulate more memory. When that happens anyone

who can get access to the files on the hard drive – locally or remotely – can read the

password.

Luckily, a solution to this problem is incredibly simple. From the security pane in System

Preferences tick “Use secure virtual memory”. Once you have done this, reboot and the

swap file will be stored in an encrypted format.

9 Firmware Password

Referring back to the attack described above in “Encrypted swap files”, the attacker

needed to be able to boot into their own operating system to recover the passwords from

RAM. It is possible to stop that from happening by password-protecting the firmware.

Doing so is slightly more involved than encrypting the virtual memory, but it may make

sense on workstations as well as laptops, depending on the environment – without the

password, an attacker can’t reboot from the OS X installation disk to reset administrator

passwords or otherwise manipulate the contents of the hard drive. It also stops computers

with unrestricted physical access, such as those in internet cafés or university computing

labs, from being booted into another operating system to circumvent any local policy.

On the installation disk that came with your Mac, go to the Applications/Utilities folder

(Apple has hidden this folder on my copy, which means that to get there I had to choose

“Go To Folder...” (Command-Shift-G) in the Finder, and type “/Volumes/Mac OS X Install

Disc 1/Applications/Utilities.” The good news is that you don’t have to type all of that, you

can type the first few characters of each part then hit Tab to complete it). The application

is called “Open Firmware Password.app” on PowerPC computers and “Firmware

Password.app” on Intel Macs. You need to provide an administrator password before you

set the firmware password, and it is very important not to forget that password as without

it you cannot change what operating system the computer boots into, nor boot in

Verbose, Safe or Single-User modes. Apple has a support article7 with a detailed

description of the consequences of entering a firmware password.

Setting a firmware password also gives protection against attackers using a FireWire

connection to snoop the contents of your computer’s memory, which can include your

login password. By connecting a FireWire cable to any Mac in its default configuration, a

bad guy can see, or even change, what is in the Mac’s memory8 without having to install

any software on the system and without any record of the intrusion. Setting the firmware

password causes the FireWire drivers to operate in a secure mode, removing this direct

memory access.

10 Automatic logout

The last item in this discussion of Mac OS X features to improve physical security is also

the least, because it offers little additional security at a cost of some convenience. In the

Security preference pane you can configure the Mac to log you out automatically if you

are not active for a certain amount of time. The problem with that is that the inactivity

time gives bad guys a chance to use the computer, while locking the screen (or even shutting the computer down) would stop them from being able to do that.

About the Author

This article was provided by Sophos and is reproduced here with their full permission. Sophos provides full data protection services including: security software, encryption software, antivirus, and malware.

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