At the presentation event of the future Mac operating system, Catalina macOS, Apple brought to the fore the increase of security.
Macos Catalina will be the first Apple's first operating system that will have its own volume for system files, and it will be “read-only”. This change will certainly bring an improvement in security.
We tested the future operating system with a Macos Mojave upgrade to macOS Catalina Public Beta, and the first thing that attracted our attention was the presence of two separate volumes (Virtual Parties on SSD) instead of one. A volume dedicated to the operating system (macos) and one for the user data (Macos Data).
If you bother you to see two or three drives instead of one, you must know that they all belong to the same “containter disk“, and the free space on the hard disk is not affected by this change. Basically, the volume dedicated to the operating system is the same as that of the data container, only that the layout only allows reading files. The modification and writing of file files from the outside is blocked.
Turning for a while, we see that Apple had a fork repeatedly with Vulnerabilities of macos systems. Even though many of the vulnerabilities did not get to be exploited by badly intentional people, the American company has sought all the time to innovate on the security side. So with the launch of Macos El Captain, Apple introduced “System Integrity Protection (SIP)“. A technology conceived not to allow the modification of system files and folders.
SIP limit system user access “root”, thus preventing maccos integrity. Despite these security improvements, methods have been found to bypass SIP protection and to install malicious applications that override and modify system files.
With the passage to Macos Catalina, Apple moves the operating system on its own volume and develops a new type of Bidirectional symbolic connection, called firmlink, thus managing to make two volumes to integrate and function as one.
Macos Catalina is currently available only in Beta version for subscribers in Apple Beta Software Program, and this autumn will launch the final version, available for all users.
