After some delays to address pressing, community-wide issues, Open Door Networks is happy to announce that our full line of Internet security products for Leopard is now available. You can of course read all about it on our Web site, but we’d thought we’d take advantage of this less formal setting to give you some of the “inside scoop.”

We’ve been playing with Leopard pre-releases for over a year now. Right off the bat we noticed something was significantly different when we went to look for the “built in” firewall (which our DoorStop X firewall greatly, IOHO, improves upon) and it was gone! Of course it wasn’t really gone, just moved from Sharing to Security Preferences. Actually, it was way more than just moved however -- it was totally rewritten. And not just rewritten -- its whole model and user interface were changed. No longer did it used tried-and-true concepts like ports and protocols, and technologies like Unix’s ipfw. Apple was clearly in “innovation mode” when it came to the Leopard built-in firewall.

After some quick tests to make sure that our DoorStop X firewall continued to work despite Apple’s changes (it did), we decided to withhold judgement on those changes (as we still are to a large extent) and move on to evaluate other networking changes in Leopard. After all, the two other key components of our DoorStop X Security Suite are just as much about helping users learn about and understand the Internet security issues of their OS as they are about firewall protection. And of course to help users in these ways, we had to thoroughly understand those issues ourselves.

We quickly discovered some major new security issues in Leopard; others, alas, alluded us until, literally, the last second. Beyond the firewall moving, we realized that Sharing and Network System Preferences had changed significantly. In concert with additions to the Finder, these changes indicated that networking was clearly becoming an even bigger part of the system, with File and Screen Sharing front and center.

Screen Sharing in particular became a major focus for us. Whereas in Tiger (10.4) only the client side of Screen Sharing (called Apple Remote Desktop) was built-in, on Leopard both sides were built-in, and in multiple different ways. You could initiate sharing of another machine’s screen through the Finder or by running the included “Screen Sharing” application (or, we realized much later, even through “Connect to Server” and vnc:// URLs). And you could also perform what turns out to be a completely different method of Screen Sharing through iChat. Screen Sharing was clearly going to be confusing to explain and to help users protect as needed, even without the Back to My Mac and Kerberos issues that were going to emerge later.

Having figured out, we thought, how to address Screen Sharing in our products, we moved onto other new items. There were a number of other new network-related features, like sharing-only user accounts, remote parental controls and Time Machine. For all of these, we had to figure out what they were all about, which if any network ports were involved, and what advice we should give both in Who’s There? and in the book. And of course these items were changing as we went along.

Just as we thought we were about done, having written about all the new features and added appropriate support to the firewall and Who’s There?, along came Kerberos. We’re not sure if Leopard’s Kerberos implementation was something we missed, or something Apple added or activated near the end, or a little of both. But its addition, across all Leopard machines, clearly changed the sharing model in a way no one had mentioned before. Apple was, for whatever reason, just “sneaking it in,” and we were going to have to help people understand and deal with it. And so we did.

And then of course, at the literal last second, there was Back to My Mac. We knew Back to My Mac could have some serious security ramifications, and had been trying for months to get this highly-promoted service to work, with no luck. So we were prepared to attack it, head on, on Leopard day (October 26). We certainly weren’t prepared for what we found, however. But that’s a story most of which has now been told, bringing us up to present day. So, with that, we’ll stop here.

Enjoy the new products, and please let us know what you think.