There was not a whole lot going on at Macworld from a security perspective, but there certainly were of few highlights in addition to the talk by Open Door’s president, Alan.

In terms of Internet security vendors, Intego was there with their standard castle-like green booth. SecureMac also had a booth. New, larger vendors included McAfee and LANDesk. Conspicuous by their absence was previous leader Symantec, whose Mac offerings have, to some extent, fallen into disrepair.

There were also a number of vendors showing “secure storage” solutions including RAID, encryption and “storage area network” products. And one vendor was showing a finger-print scanner solution for the Mac.

Beyond these items, Apple’s announcements included a couple key potential security items that merit further investigation. Time Capsule is a remote storage system mainly for use with Leopard’s Time Machine, but also potentially for use, via AFP and SMB, as a remote disk, similar to the one included with the 802.11n AirPort Extreme Base Station (on which Time Capsule is based).

Most interestingly (and complexly), the MacBook Air’s remote optical disc feature provides at least three areas where network security concerns need to be explored (on each of two platforms, since it also runs on Windows). In response to questions posed at the Apple booth, these areas seem to be: remote software installation, remote booting (mainly to allow reinstallation of the OS on the Air if needed) and remote migration assistant.

We plan to explore all three of these areas in the weeks ahead.