The first in what no doubt will be a long line of articles on Leopard security is out. The article, “How Leopard Will Improve Your Security,” in this week’s TidBITs, has an interesting take on the subject, concentrating on behind-the-scenes features that most of us will never see.

We’ve been reticent here to go into many details about Leopard security, since we’re not sure what items are technically still under non-disclosure. But it does seem the article is both accurate and informative. The main points of the article include:

1. • Time Machine - an excellent and right-on evaluation of how critical Time Machine backup will be to improving all of our security (we’re adding a whole section on Time Machine to our book for this very reason).
   

2. • Stopping Buffer Overflows - detailed behind-the-scenes stuff that will help to block hackers from exploiting flaws in Mac OS X itself and associated applications (in particular Internet applications like Safari). It’s great to see Apple being pre-emptive here, since there are very, very few such hackers right now anyway.
   

3. • Identifying and Defanging Evil Apps - more mainly internal stuff, along with the fact that Leopard will warn you whenever you first run an application downloaded from the Internet.
   

4. • Other Notable Improvements - a whole lot of other items. In particular, there’s some interesting, but not-quite-100% accurate information about Leopard’s new “built-in” firewall. Expect us to say a lot more about that one here, as soon as we’re sure we can!