An examination of the Generic Exploit Prevention Mechanisms on Apple's Leopard Operating System

The Win32 platform has long been the whipping boy of memory corruption attacks and malware, which has forced Microsoft into implementing aggressive anti-exploitation mechanisms into their newer Operating Systems. Apple's Mac OS X (Leopard) has had a much smoother run, both in the media, and in terms of high profile attacks and the reason for this is less clear. In light of Apple's increased market-share, a comparison between Microsoft's defences and Apple's defences is required as the number of anti-exploitation techniques increases with time. In order to produce a side-by-side comparison, an overview of memory corruption attacks is provided and the common generic anti-exploitation techniques for these attacks are enumerated and described. For each operating system, the quality and effective of each implemented defence is evaluated. The results of the study show that Leopard trails Windows Vista in both the number of defences, as well as the quality and effectiveness of the defences that are implemented.